Since the Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS) began its rolling deployment on April 7^th, no one has heard much from it. That changed last week, when handsets from Washington, DC to Portland, OR received CMAS messages on their phones around 3:00 PM EDT Wednesday (April 18) afternoon.

There has been talk of CMAS testing, and possibly the beginning of Required Monthly Tests (RMT), ever since the system’s first end-to-end test in New York Cityback in December. The messages received by many across the country this week may be the beginnings of this test. Continue reading »