EIIP Virtual Forum Presentation — October 28, 2009
Cell Broadcast Technology for Public Alerts & Warning
The Central Wisconsin Model
Shayne Barr
Managing Director, CellCast Technologies
Paul E. Klein
Chief Operating Officer, CellCast Technologies
Gregory W. Selig
Chief Technology Officer, Sr. Director Operations and Engineering
Airadigm Communications/Einstein Wireless
Amy Sebring
EIIP Moderator
The following has been prepared from a transcription of the recording. The complete slide set (Adobe PDF) may be downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/cellcast/CBtech.pdf for ease of printing.
[Welcome / Introduction]
Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone. Welcome to EMforum.org. We are very glad you could be with us. I am Amy Sebring and will serve as your Moderator today.
Today’s topic is "Cell Broadcast Technology for Public Alerts & Warning: The Central Wisconsin Model." You may be aware that the FCC has promulgated rules for a future Commercial Mobile Alert System or CMAS that is expected to use this technology, so this introduction may provide a better understanding of what will be implemented nationally in the future.
Also, by way of background, the technology we are discussing today, the future CMAS, Emergency Alert System (EAS), FEMA Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), as well as the existing National Weather Service’s HazCollect system, are all based on the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), an internationally adopted messaging standard developed under the auspices of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.
As you are probably aware, EAS broadcast of locally issued alerts is currently voluntary, so this week’s survey on our home page asks, "Broadcast of local Emergency Alert System (EAS) messages should be: Voluntary or Mandatory" Please take a moment to participate and review the results thus far.
Now it is my pleasure to introduce today’s guests who have been involved with the service provided in Wisconsin by Einstein Wireless with assistance from CellCast Technologies:
[Slide 1]
Shayne Barr is Managing Director for CellCast, where he leads a team of developers and engineers working on standards and interoperability solutions.
Paul Klein is Chief Operating Officer of CellCast, and is leading an effort to expand this technology both domestically and internationally.
Last but not least, joining us from Wisconsin Greg Selig is here representing Einstein Wireless, where he is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Director of Operations and Engineering.
Please see additional biographical detail, available from our Background Page, as well as related links. Welcome to all of you gentlemen, and thank you very much for being with us today. I now turn the floor over to Shayne to start us off please.
[Presentation]
[Slide 2]
Shayne Barr: I’d like to thank Amy and Avagene for helping us getting this started. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to present information on cell broadcast. I want to say a special thank you to Greg Selig as well for participating. He’s very knowledgeable about the whole cell broadcast process and we appreciate him coming on.
As was pointed out earlier, cell broadcast is a great technology for delivering emergency notification messages to cell phones on a geo-targeted basis.
What is cell broadcast? Cell broadcast is a point to multi-point technology. It’s different from a standard text message in that text messages are generally point to point. They go from one sender to a receiver. In this case, point to multi-point means you have one instance of a message effectively going to multiple receivers, or multiple cell phones in this case.
Cell broadcast delivers a short text message which looks very much like a standard SMS text message, but it delivers it to an unlimited number of cell phones without overloading the network.
An advantage of it is that the messages are geo-targeted. You can draw a polygon on a map, for example, use FIPS codes to identify the geo-targeted area—however you want to identify the geo-targeted area, effectively the message will be sent to cell phones in that polygon or that defined area. That’s another advantage of cell broadcast when you’re trying to reach a large number of cell phones in a population.
One thing I should point out is that cell broadcast is not a replacement for any, or no one is recommending that cell broadcast replace any existing notification technology, like e-mail, standard text messaging, landline notifications—this is just another notification methodology that can be used and is coming in the relatively near future.
The delivery—the phone rings with a special ring tone to announce the message. CMAS has some specific requirements for how that is going to sound when CMAS is ultimately rolled out. The message will be displayed on the phone, it will kind of pop up on your phone, and/or it can go into the phone’s inbox.
The phone number—another advantage with cell broadcast is that cell broadcast doesn’t require the user to enter their information into a database. You have much more privacy than you have with standard SMS text notifications where you have to put your phone number and contact information into a database someplace. The phone number is not used for message delivery.
Another advantage with cell broadcast is that any phones that are in the notification area, whether they are native to the network or they are roaming on the network, will receive the alert if the phone is enabled to receive cell broadcast messages. That’s a nice advantage of cell broadcast—again, no database, and if you move into an area, you’ll automatically get it.
This is being looked at around the world as a notification tool for emergency notifications. We have a person by the name of Mark Wood, our CTO, who is involved in many international forums promoting harmonization of this technology so that when you travel from country to country you will be able to receive notifications that might pertain to you.
[Slide 3]
Greg Selig: Thank you everyone for your time. My name is Greg Selig and I’m located in Wisconsin, operating a rural GSM carrier since 1996. Cell broadcast, for me, when I first brought our network up live was a feature that we would test on our switch, but we didn’t really have a use for. It was a conversation that I started having with FISA in 1999 that eventually evolved into the current relationship with CellCast as the enabler for being able to send out messages on our network.
To give you some perspective of what Einstein is without looking at our website, we have PCS 1900 spectrum throughout Wisconsin, but excluding the Milwaukee license area. For those of you familiar with Wisconsin, it’s a lot of rural areas, smaller cities. The only major market we really have is Madison, and some smaller markets like Appleton, Green Bay, and those kinds of areas.
[Slide 4]
On this slide, I’d like to talk though what cell broadcasting meant to Einstein as a carrier. For us to implement cell broadcasts, it did not require additional spectrum or bandwidth. It just required us to allow the broadcast channel on each of our cell site sectors. That did not take up additional spectrum; it was just a part of the signaling channels that were already configured on each of our cell site sectors.
There was no hardware or equipment necessary. In my network’s case, we used GSM technology. It’s a real clean interface. The other wireless technology, CDMA—there is also ways to do this; that are software that is turned on, and it’s a really very straightforward and simple step.
I already touched on the fact that functionality is bundled in the switch. What about our relationship with the Cell Broadcast center? For us, it was embarrassingly simple. We just set up a VPN tunnel that enabled that center to connect to my switching center, connect to my equipment, and if there was a message that needed to go out, it would connect in and it knew what cell site sectors it needed that message to go out on.
So, I didn’t have any equipment that was installed on site, I just worked with the cell broadcast broker that was located elsewhere. The broker really had all the intelligence as far as messages that currently go through my network, like weather alerts, and things of that nature.
All I needed to provide to that aggregator, or broker, was information on my network similar to what is already provided for E911 phase 2 calling. It is location of cell sites, basically. That was a very straightforward data translation of the definition for us.
That was the network piece of it. You do need to convey information to the subscriber. There was information with a pamphlet that we created with instruction as far as how to activate the cell broadcast channels on your handset. We had to be prepared for customers that would inevitably call into customer care asking questions. Overall, it was a very simple process. It was a mechanism that was set up in 2006 and has been in place since then.
That is the basics of the wireless carrier side of the implementation. With that, I believe I hand the next slide over to Paul.
[Slide 5]
Paul Klein: Good morning, everybody. This is Paul. If you look at this diagram now, the purpose of it is to give the emergency managers and the carriers and anyone interested a sense of how we look at this delivery system, moving from left to right. You can put Greg’s comments within this schematic. It really all begins with the emergency manager on the left side originating the message. That could be government, public safety.
There are quite a few vehicles out there. Our front end software for the emergency manager, we call it EAGLE (Emergency Alert Government and Law Enforcement) and there are quite a few others that can generate a message.
That message goes out in CAP protocols into what Greg described earlier, the aggregator gateway, which has two components to it basically. One is to administer the rules as to who is authorized to give a message, what kinds of messages can they give, and to what area and what priorities get applied to multiple message sending.
The second part of the component is obviously accountability—recording and passing that message on once it passes all the tests. It then goes into, as Greg said, the cell broadcast center, which then delivers it to the appropriate carriers, any participating carriers, to their base station controllers, which then delivers it out to the geo-targeted area that the emergency manager originally intended the message to arrive at.
At this point, we’re moving over to here—here’s delivery, only to the cell sites specified back here by the emergency manager. In addition, the aggregator has the capability of giving the person sending the message the option of using non-cell broadcast methods. Any program can deliver SMS, or text messages, or faxes, or landline calls, or emails, or updates on a website, or cell phone calls, or sirens, or billboards, all of those can happen at the selection of the message sender over here.
[Slide 6]
The function that Greg Selig talked about is cell broadcasting and Shayne pointed out at the beginning is really a new paradigm in the world of mass warning. We know that it is scalable. We can geo-target that message to reach a few people in a targeted area or if there happen to be at the time of the message a million people in that area, the system will reach anybody with an activated phone.
We know that it delivers instant real time communication, and that it is a very fertile, rich and robust technology because you can sub-divide into what I call virtual channels—special channels that would only reach certain people. You can designate a channel for only those people to receive a message.
Additionally, the system that you saw in the previous slide, remember that one of the jobs that the aggregator has in all of this is to authenticate and authorize a message. Somebody trying to send a spam message cannot enter the system to do that, so basically, it is protected against spamming, hacking, and spoofing (i.e., sending phony messages).
This is a very efficient system. Cell broadcast will not overload the carrier network. In a sense think of the fact that you’re using the capacity to send one text message, and you’re managing to reach millions of people possibly in the targeted area.
What we know is that in emergency situations, load is a very natural phenomenon. There are articles written about that, and research that has been done. There is a certain point at which voice-to-voice, which when people that are in an emergency, whether they call somebody, they look for additional information—all of this creates a burden on the network.
Cell broadcast, because of its efficiency, really bypasses that. In situations where everything else gets backed up, if the power isn’t functioning, it will function. In any of the operational or test scenarios in the United States or abroad, the cell broadcast feature and the system you’ve just seen has passed all of the tests.
The technology within the system is already upgraded and ready for, with the carriers’ point of view, new technology such as LTE, 3G and 4G.
[Slide 7]
Here if we look at one example of a subset use of the cell broadcast system, is you could actually create a channel for certain officials. They could be special agents at the border, for example, special law enforcement agencies, border protection, port security. And a sample of a message like that you can see on the left—a certain level of agent, and only level 5 security agents. If I were someone who just had normal citizen alert, I would not see this message.
As you see, the message allows me to talk to people closest to the problem, which during an emergency is critical. If I have to call a whole area, this is going to take me a bunch of calls. This way, I send out the message and people who are in the area can say, "I confirm, I’m available, I can be there."
With that, I’m going to pass the baton back to you, Shayne.
[Slide 8]
Shayne Barr: On the next slide, it just talks about some of the approval milestones that have been accomplished out there. I demonstrated this at NIEM. Interoperability is a big thing, and I think this is a big thing for all of the companies in the emergency notification space, that we all want to be interoperable and be able to share messages back and forth.
This slide is just identifying some of the different groups in which we participate and several other companies participate in as well. The DM-OPEN, NIMS (an evaluation program which many of you may be familiar with on the emergency management side), and some of standards, like CAPv1.2 (CAPv1.1 is the current standard, but CAPv1.2 is coming out very soon).
HazCollect, which is going to be the ability to send non-weather emergency notifications out over the National Weather Service System.
[Slide 9]
The next slide gives you some idea again of interoperability. It shows DM-OPEN, which is one of the facilitating applications that we use to exchange messages with other vendors. Across the bottom, this is showing cell broadcast works in conjunction with other notification methodologies (email, situational awareness, sirens, SMS, tone alert radios). All these may be selected.
A message may go out over all of these mediums to notify the public, or you may choose to use selected items here to do the notification. As far as the origination, National Weather Service alerts, Center for Disease Control, Amber alerts, alerts just from other messaging front ends, and then Presidential alerts, which is the purpose of the WARN act, to be able to notify the entire country, ultimately, on cell phones.
[Slide 10, 11]
Paul Klein
Chief Operating Officer
Office: 832-326-0730
paul.klein@cellcastcorp.com
Tom Fahy
Consultant, Strategic Initiatives
Office: 202-349-3911Cell: 202-375-4696
tfahy@capitolgr.com
CellCast Technologies,
LLC17 Research Park Drive
St. Charles, Missouri
www.cellcastcorp.com
info@cellcastcorp.com
Amy Sebring: Thanks very much to all of you for that overview. Now, to proceed to our Q&A.
[Audience Questions & Answers]
Question:
Henry Black: Question for Shayne Barr: Would you be so kind to tell us about your commitment to working on the CMAS solution as you have gone through NIMS and participate in DM-OPEN?
Shayne Barr: I guess the focus there, again, is for interoperability. That’s was a major focus of NIMS, one of the major scoring points on it. DM-OPEN is the same thing—it’s an interoperability feature. There are a lot of silos out there. I guess in the past, with regards to messages not being able to be handed off between different emergency messaging groups.
Across the country there are a great variety of notification tools and ultimately, warning systems that are out there. They’re somewhat in a silo—you’re not able to exchange information back and forth, and DM-OPEN and NIMS are both geared towards the ability for every emergency manager in the country ultimately to be able to exchange information back and forth in a fairly real time basis, which is a substantial upgrade over what we have even today.
Question:
Amy Sebring: What do you see for this going forward with CMAS as it becomes implemented—your role with CellCast participating in CMAS?
Shayne Barr: For our part, we expect to participate in CMAS. We will be vying for the aggregator/gateway function, which is defined to be kind of a controlling point when emergency managers send in a message. Regardless of what front end system they are using to originate the message, there is a middleware piece that will receive the message and authenticate the message, make sure that the message originator is allowed to send the message to the area that he has geo-targeted.
Once that information has been validated (and that is just one example of the various validations that will take place) that system will then forward the message to the wireless carriers in the notification area. That is kind of the piece part that CellCast is very actively involved with. So, you have a front end solution, and we have that middleware solution (the aggregator/gateway solution).
Question:
Bob Goldhammer: Question for Greg: You mentioned "weather alerts" very briefly in your opening comments. I live "just down the road from you" in Iowa. Both of our states along with most of the rest of the country get hit with lots of bad weather. How (or perhaps the question is can) this process interact automatically (and I stress the word automatically) with the NWS severe weather warning polygon technology?
Greg Selig: Certainly, all the storms that Wisconsin gets originate up from Iowa and just head northeast, so we’re seeing a lot of the same activities. The alerts actually just naturally come through the system. The aggregator or broker, or whatever terminology you’re using, is tied into all the nationwide alerts, and it is that system’s responsibility to understand that this alert geographically is associated with the ten cell sites that I have around Appleton, Wisconsin, for example.
If the aggregator, then, does a translation that says there’s a tornado warning message that needs to go out on the cell site sectors in Appleton, it automatically connects to my system and sends those messages out.
Shayne Barr: Greg has covered it pretty well. There are two pieces there—the aggregator function and the CBC piece. The polygon is coming across, and that polygon is being analyzed and notifications are being sent to people in that polygon area. It’s not sending notifications out to people that are outside of the polygon area, as the system is implemented today.
The CBC piece is a separate piece from the aggregator gateway. The aggregator gateway is meant to be the collection point ultimately for all messages that are going to go out over cell broadcast. Every emergency notification that is designated to go out over cell broadcast will initially flow through the aggregator gateway for validation.
One of the issues you have is making sure people are authorized to send notifications to the geo-political areas, the boundaries. If you have one county emergency manager, you don’t want them to be able to send (by mistake possibly) emergency notification two or three counties over. That’s one of the functions of the aggregator gateway.
In the case of a National Weather Service alert, it would look at that and it would say, "This is a legitimate message from a nationally authorized sender". They can send to virtually anyplace in the U.S. We would pass that off.
The CBC portion is a portion that we’ve been working with. That portion is actually provided by another vendor, and we’re working with those vendors to make that function available to the wireless carriers, like Greg, and it’s really a network component. But as Greg pointed out, it can be a hosted facility. It doesn’t have to be something that you purchase and put into your network directly. It can work on a hosted basis.
Question:
J.R. Jones: Would each civilian have to enable each of his cellphones in order for this system to work? Would an emergency message override an ongoing cellphone conversation? What happens when towers are blown down or disabled, as in a nuclear event?
Greg Selig: Basically, there are menu instructions about how to turn on the correct channels associated with the emergency notification. I think as the industry gets a little more in tune with this, as we sell handsets, we have them pre-configured with certain settings, including my own network name and voicemail, and all of that. This just becomes one of those settings that end up getting pre-configured in the handset so that it’s a default that cell broadcast is enabled on a handset, and the basic channels are defined on that handset.
Amy Sebring: As it stands now, the answer to his question is yes, you would have to enable that capability on each of your cell phones, right?
Greg Selig: Yes.
Shayne Barr: That is correct, and it may be that that feature is not available on all hand sets manufactured today.
Paul Klein: There is some research that has looked at what percentage of people in an area constitutes a tipping point where you assume others in the area will get the message. I’ve heard figures quoted as moderate as 20% therefore creates the message radiating out to others. One hundred percent penetration would be the goal I think all of us would want to see reached.
There are studies that indicate that if we hit a fraction of those people to start with, we will still have the impact the emergency manager wants to let people in the area get messages as quickly as possible.
Greg Selig: (re: override an ongoing cell phone conversation) It actually ends up being parallel events. You’re on an active call; the message is received and displayed on the handset. There’s an audible tone or something of that nature created by the handset, so just because you’re on a voice call doesn’t mean you can’t receive that message. It is not going to interrupt your call.
If our means to transmit is taken out of service, then we do not have a mechanism for getting that message out. What happens in situations of disasters or where we have to compensate for problems at individual sites, the networks will deploy cell on wheels that will behave from RF perspective just like the original cell site, with some limitations—it may not be quite as tall and things like that.
The immediate impact is that the cell site blows out or goes out of service, while we don’t have a mechanism to get a message out. However, that becomes replaced just because of the way all of us operate as wireless carriers.
Question:
Scott A. Carter: Please describe how cell broadcast signals can effectively present a "no-load" factor to a wireless network, as opposed to SMS based messages used for emergencies.
Greg Selig: I’ll compare a cell broadcast message to an SMS that we may broadcast out to my customer base, for instance. An SMS, if we send it out to 10,000 customers, that’s 10,000 individual messages that are individually addressed, that get queued up on my short message system center, so there’s latency for getting those messages out.
The latency is caused by the short message system itself, needing to check people’s status and location. Latency is caused by bandwidth, just in the SS7 connections to the platform, and all of that. That results in a delay in the delivery of those short messages that are individually addressed and actually greatly affects the network itself, because at every cell site sector, I have certain common channels that are defined for call setup and SMS delivery and my broadcast channel.
The SMS delivery channels, if I’m trying to push 10,000 messages out quickly, it takes up capacity, and those messages don’t get out. It’s a problem.
With cell broadcast, I’m pushing out one message that all the handsets can listen to, so my volume is much different and I don’t have the bandwidth issues along the way.
Question:
Lloyd Colston: How does this enhance or interfere with Wireless Priority Service? How long would the expectation be to deliver a 15-second message to every cell phone user within range of a tower?
Greg Selig: Wireless Priority Service relates to SMS, point to point and voice call so it ends up being a separate issue for us.
Time lag on the network side is very short, maybe like 5 to 10 seconds at most. There’s more time incurred on the aggregator and broker side of things. Even our tests showed that within a minute, at most a minute and a half, our message was getting all the way through the broker and the aggregator out to our network and to the end user.
Shayne Barr: The expectation is that regardless of the notification area, that you should be able to get that message out to the whole country in a matter of just a minute or two, whether it’s a small county area, for example, or the entire country. It’s really not going to have much impact on the time delivery of that message.
Question:
Chuck: How does the agency safely administer groups? You mentioned that the system does not use regular phone numbers. If it uses cell addressing isn't there a risk of compromise (spam, etc.)?
Shayne Barr: The cell broadcast right now, this is not like a text message, where anyone can get on and send a text message. Virtually anyone can send a text message to anyone else. That’s one of the issues with those types of notifications. With cell broadcast right now, there is no open channel for creating and sending a broadcast over a carrier’s network.
It’s not really something available to the public at this point. It’s a controlled entry point. That’s the function of the aggregator gateway and the CBC. The aggregator gateway, again, is authenticating and making sure that a legitimate sending source is sending the message. That’s part of the variety of checks it is going through, is doing that process.
Question:
Henry Black: For any presenter, how can a "user" or "subscriber" pick and choose the type of alert or warning wishes to receive using the Cell Broadcast technology?
Shayne Barr: The person with the cell phone has the ability to configure the phone on a range of virtual channels up to, I believe, 1,000. They can enable those; turn them on or off themselves. That’s up to the subscriber. For the number ranges above that currently, I believe those are controlled by the network.
It’s not completely clear from my standpoint whether all life-threatening alerts, for example, are going to go out over a single virtual channel, or if they may be divided up, and the Weather Service may have its own virtual channel and Amber alerts may go out over their own virtual channel, and so on and so forth.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Are you using the CMAS 90 character message length limitation? How many characters can I get, as an emergency manager, into my message?
Shayne Barr: We’re not using that limitation at this point. We’re using closer to 160 character length message. We haven’t shortened notifications to comply with the CMAS specs at this point.
Greg Selig: The reality is you’re dealing with screen size on handsets. Some of them have quite a bit of clarity on the size of the screen. Some of the screens, on the cheaper handsets, have very little that they can display. But as you receive a cell broadcast message, if your screen doesn’t display all the text on the first page, you can actually page through it.
Shayne Barr: I would add that the message originator typically is going to format that message to comply with the CMAS specification. I think that right now we’re picking up the header from the National Weather Service messages.
Question:
Justin Brewster: Has this solution been tested on a CDMA network?
Shayne Barr: Not here in the U.S.
Question:
Scott A. Carter: It is my understanding that you are assisting the Emergency Managers of Sri Lanka with an Interoperable Communications Solution for Tsunami and other emergency alerts?
Paul Klein: Actually, yes, there is a pilot program that is being scheduled to begin in the next quarter. It will be a rigorous task, and we’ll go through all the hoops and the end results will be posted.
Question:
Amy Sebring: I have a question about HazCollect. Is your EAGLE front end ready to do the NWEM messaging now?
Shayne Barr: We have the HazCollect out there and we’re going to be demonstrating it at OASIS. That’s something I invite everyone to. OASIS is demonstrating at the IAEM in Orlando. We are participating with several other emergency vendors, and it would be a great chance to stop by and see us and the other vendors as well.
We have several emergency scenarios that we’re going to be demonstrating for messaging interoperability. HazCollect is one we’ll be demonstrating.
Question:
Chip Wilson: Can end-users limit the area from which they will receive alerts (i.e. neighborhood, local, regional, etc.)
Shayne Barr: The emergency manager, whoever that might be, it might be the Weather Service or a local emergency manager, has the capability of defining a polygon, which is simply pulling up a map and drawing a boundary on the map and saying, "This is the area I want to target." It could be a county, the boundary of a county, roughly. It could be a FIPS code that defines that county.
As you move around with your phone, one of the advantages of this is that you will receive notifications on your phone, and those notifications by their nature will pertain to you. You will be in the effected area of that notification.
In the case of a text message, you may not be in the effected area. In fact, that’s why we talk about the advantage of using cell broadcast in conjunction with text messaging. If I have a second house someplace, and I’m not physically there, there may be an event occurring at that location. Maybe my family is visiting that location at the time. A text message can notify me because I’m outside of the cell broadcast notification area. But they will get the cell broadcast message.
Cell broadcast messages you will only receive if it pertains to you, because they are geo-targeted. They’re going to go to the area that is in the alert situation only. It will not be broadcast across the country. If it’s in the warning area and receiving a signal from the tower, it will get the message. If it’s not in the area, there will be no message for it to receive.
Question:
Bob Goldhammer: Will severe weather warnings stay "live" for people entering into the cellphone coverage area after the initial issuance?
Shayne Barr: The message will be repeated at some interval so that people entering into the warning area, or people that may not have had cell phone service for whatever reason, they turned it off and turned it back on, or they’re in an underground area where the signal doesn’t reach, and they come back into the area, it will notify them. It’s a function of the aggregator gateway and/or the CBC.
Greg Selig: On the network side, we never just broadcast a message once. We actually repeat it 10, 20, or 50 times. You do have momentary lapses in RF coverage, so in that way, the message is received by the handset. The question that follows on from that is, "I don’t want 50 messages being received from my handset."
The message that goes out has a sequence number, so if your handset sees that it has already displayed the message with this particular sequence number, it’s not going to re-display it. Then you do not have that nuisance. It just displays once.
Question:
J.R. Jones: Please give location, time of IAEM EXPO in Orlando
Shayne Barr: The demo is running next Tuesday, all day, and Wednesday, and I believe Monday evening we are also doing some presentations. That’s in Orlando, Florida. At IAEM.com you can get the details.
Question:
Rhonda Grandi: What if the recipient does not have a text messaging plan. Are they charged per message fees for each message received?
Greg Selig: No, it does not require the SMS feature to be active for that subscriber. There’s nothing in the home location register that has to be defined against that subscriber for this to work.
Shayne Barr: Also, per CMAS, a per message charge is not allowed.
[Closing]
Amy Sebring: Time to wrap for today. Thanks very much to you all for a great job, and taking the time to share this information with us. Also thanks to Tom Fahy, for helping to coordinate our program today.
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