Federal and provincial officials tested the National Public Alerting System in Quebec on Monday morning, but many people never heard a peep.
At 9:55 a.m. cell phones on LTE networks across the province were supposed to buzz or ring with a tone similar to an ambulance alarm.
As that time came and went, though, alerts were spotted on television and heard on radio, but it appears that the cell phone network did not react.
The CRTC said the problem was not with the cellphone network, but was between emergency management systems in Quebec and Pelmorex Corp., which operates the system, said the CRTC's Patricia Valladao.
"The alerts are actually coming from the emergency management in the region and then it goes to Pelmorex," Valladao said.
The alert system is designed to notify the public of imminent disaster or emergency such as a tornado warning, a biological threat of some kind, or the spill of hazardous materials.
"What happened this morning in Quebec, a space was incorrectly included on the coding which prevented the alert ready system in terms of text to the compatible wireless device earlier this morning," said Valladao.
The alert messages are distributed by cell broadcast technology and cannot be tracked.
Ontario tested its system at 1:55 p.m. and it appears to have worked, though some reported on social media that they had no yet received their alerts.
The test alerts were also expected to be broadcast across TV and radio airwaves, but in some cases no messages were seen on TV screens.
Valladao also pointed out that this was the purpose of the test -- and it was not a real emergency.
"That's why we run tests to ensure that all systems are a go and everything's working properly in case of a real emergency. In this one, the misconfiguration was quickly corrected," she said.
Technology expert Carmi Levy agreed that it's not a major concern.
"Well it's not as concerning as we might think, because that's what testing is really supposed to do. It's supposed to find those bugs and know where they are so we can fix them, apparently it was a space in the coding which means probably human error, so someone punched the wrong character in the wrong place," he said.
Depending on settings, users with compatible devices connected to an LTE network were expected to hear a tone similar to an ambulance siren or feel a vibration for eight seconds. Devices that were turned off would not receive the signal but phone users receiving the alerts would have heard their conversations interrupted by a sound similar to a call-waiting tone.
The rest of the country will test the system on Wednesday.
People who are in the midst of a telephone call when the alert sounds will be interrupted with a tone.
Some cell phones will require their users to hit an acknowledgement button before they use their phones.
- With a report from The Canadian Press
