Industry Groups and Companies Ask FCC to Push Back CAP Deadline Again
The FCC asked whether it should again delay mandated compliance with FEMA’s Common Alerting Protocol for EAS (CD May 27 p4), and the answer from most parties was yes. Cable operators, phone companies and broadcasters all told the FCC to push back its Sept. 30 deadline by at least 6 months and some sought an extra year. But EAS equipment maker Sage Alerting Systems said the deadline shouldn’t be pushed back and that most of the broadcast industry is ready. “Another extension will simply delay orders until near the end of the new limit, much as the extension in November 2010 halted orders for a few months,” it said. The FCC should keep the deadline for making sure EAS participants have the equipment in place to receive CAP alerts, but give them another 90 days after FEMA starts distributing emergency messages to “actually begin receiving messages” from FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System servers, it said. That way they can learn how to use the equipment, it said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Some stations are finding it “impossible" to have CAP equipment installed by the Sept. 30 deadline, some religious broadcasters said. The gear is expensive because of the lack of meaningful competition among vendors and there’s not enough time to install the necessary equipment, said a group of religious broadcasters including the Houston Christian Broadcasters which sought a one-year extension. Prometheus Radio Project also suggested pushing the deadline back a year.
The commission shouldn’t make low-power FM stations buy new EAS equipment that may ultimately fail to meet future EAS certification requirements, Prometheus said. That would mean they'd eventually have to replace the gear, which is expensive for stations, some of which have an annual budget smaller than the $3,000 it would cost to buy a CAP-compliant EAS decoder, it said. Some stations would have to go off the air to avoid non-compliance fees, it said. A 360-day extension will give equipment makers six months to certify their gear and stations another six months to select, install and test the equipment and train staff to use it, it said.
Small cable operators also sought an extra year to come into CAP compliance. Operators with 1.5 million subscribers or less should get a 12-month extension, the American Cable Association said. The costs are harder for smaller operators to manage and smaller operators often have trouble acquiring equipment, ACA said. The commission should also extend the general CAP-compliance deadline, ACA said. The FCC needs time to review the comments in the proceeding and presumably adopt a definitive rulemaking and order, ACA said.
Verizon and the NCTA were among those seeking a 180-day extension. Certification standards are still not in place, most states still haven’t defined the sources from which EAS providers will receive CAP alerts, and acquiring and installing all the needed equipment will take time, Verizon said. “In fact, many providers, including Verizon, are still awaiting delivery of the equipment that they will need to implement CAP on their systems,” Verizon said. Once delivered it still needs to be set up and tested, Verizon said.
Uncertainty over how CAP messages will be delivered to cable operators is another reason to push back the compliance deadline, NCTA Said. “And a further complicating factor is that operators will be simultaneously testing and preparing existing cable plant for the national EAS test in early November, which does not involve CAP technology,” NCTA said. The FCC should also set up a certification process for CAP-compliant EAS gear, NCTA said. “It took months to implement the original EAS because of interoperability issues between different manufacturers’ equipment,” it said. “CAP is more complicated and poses a higher margin for error if equipment is not adequately tested.”
AT&T’s U-verse service has its own challenges specific to encrypted two-way IPTV platforms, AT&T said. It asked the FCC to limit the number of RSS feeds EAS participants will be required to monitor as its own solution is capped at eight per each encoder/decoder. Plus “AT&T’s network security team must create new firewall rules for each RSS feed to allow its system to access and retrieve any new CAP messages,” it said. That adds security risks to its network, it said, not addressing the Sept. 30 deadline.