Cell broadcast has been widely deployed since 2008 by major Asian, US, Canadian, South American and European network operators. Not all operators have the Cell Broadcast messaging function activated in their network yet, but most of the currently used handsets support cell broadcast, however on many devices it is disabled by default and there isn't a standardised interface to enable the feature.
Cell Broadcast messaging was first demonstrated in Paris in 1997. Some mobile operators used Cell Broadcast for communicating the area code of the antenna cell to the mobile user (via channel 050), for nationwide or citywide alerting, weather reports, mass messaging, location-based news, etc.