NDAA passed: Internet and Online Streaming Services Emergency Alert Study

Tue Jan 5 23:37:54 UTC 2021

On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 2:50 PM <bzs at theworld.com> wrote:

> Could we make the battery just a little more powerful? How much power
> would a bit of circuitry waiting for a "turn on! there's a new message
> coming in!" need?   [....]

If your  network connectivity, or web browser, or cellular reception
stops working;
people realize very quickly that they aren't getting messages, and
that something is
wrong.  Well,   maybe,  sometimes people break PMTU Discovery by
firewalling off ICMP for "security",  but even more often:

People already ignore testing their smoke detectors.
Emergency radios in smoke detectors would be too hard to test, so basically,
people would not test them every week,  or they would be annoyed by
the weekly test,
and defeat them  -  then when an actual emergency happens,  30% of the
detectors,
don't pick up a thing,  because their local environment and signal
propagation changed,
they're in a signal dead zone, or the nearest NOAA transmitter was 100
miles away,
and there was too much local interference to get a decodable message, anyways.

Emergency receivers are subject to signal, reception, and coverage issues,
even if you can put one in every smoke detector.  They are a neat add-on,
but do not displace the motivation to distribute true emergency messages over
100% of available services from 3rd party communication providers,
including the internet,
cellular networks, broadcast streaming, all services, etc.

Devices used to access streaming services, and web content have a huge
Advantage -  End users receive ordinary content and communications on these
devices every day,  and there is a service provider to continually
monitor services,
so it makes sense to levy the responsibility upon those distribution providers
and network operators - that will make a more reliable result, since
end users don't require extra work
to verify these are actually working, etc.

For Smoke Detector + Emergency receiver..
Probably need to add external power.   Might as well use a separate power
supply and a separate unit.   A smoke detector is microwatts, and a radio
receiver with logic for decoding and processing the analog waveform is more
than a hundred milliwatts.  "Not turning on" - is a sure way to not
receive a signal -
RFI and EM are abundant, and active logic is required to discriminate
a true message.

> etc.
--
-JH