Earthquake Alert System For Mobiles

File this under there's no such thing as too much information: The three largest cell carriers in Japan are getting together to develop an earthquake alert system for mobiles.

The Asian island country, home to a great many of the world's earthquakes every year, already has an early warning system that monitors primary waves and predicts times and locations for devastating secondary waves. Information culled from this system is sent instantly to TV stations, radio outlets, and cellular companies. Warning time can be several seconds or a minute. Either way, that's not much time to do anything except get yourself in a protective situation.


The plan—being hammered out by NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and Softbank— would extend that distant early warning to text messages sent out on the three carriers' networks. Such warnings would indeed be better than nothing. The system is expected to be in place next year.

A far more intriguing possibility is that the system is allowed to be tied in with gas valves and electricity at major manufacturing plants. A big earthquake-related killer is subsequent fires, which often kill more people than the original quake. It's highly possible that such cross-control is in the future of the phone warning system.


Written by Jeff Strickler
Published in Mobile Phones