Day: February 4, 2014

This week, we were reminded that CO’s 9-1-1Foundation has a page that makes it much easier for Colorado residents to find the emergency notification sign-up page for their county.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a big improvement over a lot of the other promotional work we’ve seen in other states.  And we heard from a board member of that foundation that they’re planning to do an ad campaign to promote the page, which is great.

Because the US National Emergency Alert Registry has over 2,000 registration pages in its database, it’s not realistic to expect residents to scroll through so much to find their page (we’re working on a lookup function to solve that).  But Colorado has only about 60 listings, so it’s much easier to deal with – especially since most of these are at the county level.

We’ve just updated all our numbers on the trend toward “wireless-only” households, and the results are startling.

Based on our projections, the US will be a majority “wireless-only” nation by sometime in 2015.  We also took US Census projections of population changes to 2060 and estimate that we’ll be 70% wireless-only by 2020 and over 80% wireless-only by 2030.

The basis of these projections involves some guesswork, but here’s one reason why we might be underestimating:

Once most of the people you know no longer have a home telephone, why would you?

As the nation goes progressively wireless-only, how are we going to reach these people in an emergency?  WEA/IPAWS is certainly one answer, but cannot be used for many of the messages sent out by emergency managers.

We need to get people registered.