• The Ministry of the Interior has developed "FR-Alert", a telephone alert system to inform the French in the event of serious incidents in their geographical area.

  • These notifications accompanied by a ringtone will automatically appear on smartphones, without the users having to install anything.

  • 20 Minutes

    takes stock of the operation of this new system which will send notifications in the event of a fire, an attack or an industrial accident.

You may soon receive government alert messages directly on your smartphone.

Since Tuesday, a brand new security system has been deployed throughout France.

It is called "FR-Alert" and it was developed by the Ministry of the Interior to send notifications to the mobile phones of people present in an area affected by a major incident.

20 Minutes

tells you everything about this new device.

How does "FR-Alert" work?

“FR-Alert” is not a mobile application.

The system does not install or download.

“FR-Alert” is a device based on “cell broadcast” technology.

The messages are sent via telephone antennas to the portables located near them, in the form of radio waves and not by SMS, in order to avoid saturating the network.

The dissemination of alerts is therefore done by more or less large area and in a fairly precise manner.

If you are in the relevant broadcast space, you will receive a notification accompanied by a specific sound signal and a vibration.

It works even if your phone is in silent mode… but not if it's in airplane mode or turned off.

However, the government indicates that the "cell broadcast" currently only works on 4G and soon 5G, which excludes people who do not have a smartphone.

"The geolocated SMS system operating on 2G, 3G and 4G will be deployed later", specifies the Elysée.

In which cases will the French receive messages?

The Home Office says the notifications will be sent to people in "an area facing a threat or serious danger".

This can be natural events (flood, storm, cyclone, fire, tsunami, volcanic eruption, etc.), biological and chemical accidents (pollution, gas leak, nuclear incident, etc.) health hazards (epidemic, pandemic, agri-food incident, etc.), technological and industrial incidents (breakdown of telecommunications means, serious accidents on road, rail or air networks, industrial incident, etc.) or even serious public security events such as terrorist attacks terrorists.

The notifications will give information on the nature of the risk, its location, the attitude to adopt and possibly a link to obtain additional information.

Note that "FR-Alert" was "on a real population" for the first time in the Bouches-du-Rhône.

On May 17 and 18, the system was tested during a risk management exercise "of an extraordinary scale", had reported at the time the prefect of the region Christophe Mirmand.

Called Domino, the exercise had mobilized more than 1,000 people every day around the Etang de Berre.

Why did the SAIP system, ancestor of "FR-Alert", fail?

If this “FR-Alert” device is imposed by a European directive, France had already attempted the operation between 2016 and 2018 with the SAIP system.

Set up after the attacks in Paris, the objective was the same: "to warn the population of a given area of ​​an imminent danger".

But the means were different.

SAIP was a downloadable application on which users had to activate geolocation and notifications.

As a result, only one million people downloaded the app.

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This was not available with some operating systems and had to remain open on iPhones to work.

It also proved to be quite ineffective in 2016 in Nice.

In 2016, the alert was triggered three hours after the attack that took place on July 14 on the Promenade des Anglais.

Under these conditions, there is no chance for SAIP to compete with Facebook's "safety check" function or with the speed of information dissemination on Twitter.

The government had therefore decided to stop the charges.

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  • Company

  • Security

  • Minister of the Interior

  • Alert

  • attack

  • Fire

  • Accident

  • Incident

  • Danger

  • Telephone