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🇸🇪 Sweden /Disasters & Emergencies

Expert says Sweden’s next emergency-alert test must work better

From Dagens Nyheter · () Swedish

Translated from Swedish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources Ongoing story
  • Sweden’s new SE-Alert emergency message reached many people in Stockholm and Gotland but did not reach all Telia customers.
  • KTH professor Emil Björnsson described the large-scale test as a useful way to identify technical problems, while warning that the system should perform better in December.
  • Sweden’s Civil Defence Agency is investigating the fault and expects the next test to cover the entire country.

The first large-scale test of Sweden’s new emergency-alert system exposed a problem: the message did not reach all Telia customers. KTH professor Emil Björnsson says that is not alarming yet, provided the faults are fixed.

At 3 p.m. on Monday, an alert reached smartphones in Stockholm and Gotland. The signal sounded for 10 seconds, and the test was intended to reach 2.6 million people. The Civil Defence Agency said it was troubleshooting the failure.

If it does not work then, there is more reason to criticize.

· Emil BjörnssonThe KTH professor said Sweden should face stronger criticism if the nationwide December test fails.

SE-Alert uses technology that sends a message to every phone in a defined area at the same time, rather than addressing individual numbers. Phones belonging to visitors from foreign networks can also sound while those users are in Sweden.

Björnsson said some teething problems were understandable in the first test on such a scale. But he expects more from the next trial, which the agency will probably hold in December across the country. If the system still fails to work nationwide then, he said, there would be stronger grounds for criticism.

It is a completely new way of reaching out to the public: starting the sound on all phones.

· Emil BjörnssonHe described how SE-Alert differs from messages sent to individual phone numbers.
About this summary

Originally published by Dagens Nyheter in Swedish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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