EAS Players Want Changes to FCC EAS Order

Senior Director Ed Czarnecki of Monroe Electronics met with FCC and FEMA officials Wednesday to express concern over the ban on text-to-voice conversion, which was unexpected. “For FEMA and a minority of states, it does throw some sand in the gears,” he said. “We're generally very pleased with the FCC’s approach to streamlining the certification process for EAS and CAP equipment.” Equipment makers like Monroe were relieved that the FCC adopted the voluntary industry standard. Czarnecki acknowledged that voice-to-text isn’t perfect, especially with regard to pronunciation of place names and the ability of listeners with special needs to understand machine speech. The FCC declined to comment for this article.

The text-to-speech ban is particularly troubling for the approximately 14,000 U.S. radio stations, which may not have the staff on hand to read text alerts that come through, in addition to the challenge of audio degrading with each retransmission, said President Harold Price of Sage Alerting Systems. “The intent is to allow the president to reach the American public in times of great need when the rest of the infrastructure is at risk or has deteriorated,” said Price, who plans to meet with the FCC about the issue this week. “The backbone of relaying the messages is typically done by AM and FM radio stations,” he said. “If you send it to radio stations that have text-to-speech capability, they can translate it to speech and now the rich information is available to listeners.” He pointed to the work the National Weather Service has done to improve its computer-generated speech. “The emergency services community was looking forward to text to speech,” said Price.

Cable operators and radio and TV broadcasters have been installing CAP-capable equipment since 2008, with about 70 percent of the industry compliant, Price estimated. At the peak, Sage was selling 200 to 250 encoder-decoder units a week, a number which has dropped off considerably, as expected. Prices are likely to climb slightly as fewer units are made and distributed, but should remain around the current $2,200 to $3,000 for a standard system and up to $5,000 for “fully tricked out boxes,” he said.

The American Cable Association is concerned about the burden the new equipment places requirement on the smallest operators, who may have only a few dozen to a few hundred individual customers. Even the cost of filing a waiver request -- as provided for in the rulemaking -- can be prohibitive for such small entities, and the waiver lasts just six months, said Vice President Ross Lieberman. “We would've hoped the FCC would have adopted a streamlined waiver process, which would allow a mom-and-pop cable company to apply.” The smallest cable operators received waivers from previous EAS requirements that expired in 2007, so they only recently installed that equipment, he noted. “My members understand the importance of EAS,” Lieberman said. “There’s a little bit of frustration for a small system having to upgrade their EAS system in 2007 and having to do it again in 2012."

The ACA will be following up with the FCC about these concerns. “These systems are breaking even or in some cases losing money, and these added costs -- although it’s not a huge amount of money -- we're afraid may lead to their premature shutdown as a result of, [them feeling] this is just not worth it,” Lieberman said. “There’s a lot of options that are available for looking at how to accommodate smaller operators and we're hopeful that we can have a good discussion with the FCC.” Possible avenues to change the rulemaking include a petition for reconsideration.

Some mid-size cable operators foresee no problems with converting to CAP-capable gear. RCN doesn’t “see any problem with compliance by June 30,” when the equipment rules take effect, said Senior Vice President Christian Fenger. “We'll be working with our vendors.” Costs won’t be substantial to upgrade, though the cable operator doesn’t have an exact expense estimate yet, he said. Midcontinent Communications has been compliant with the order for about a year, said Senior Vice President Tom Simmons.

Many larger companies are already compliant with the new format. “We're ready for this -- we started on this process last year,” said Vice President Jim Ocon of Gray TV. “We wanted to be in a position to take full advantage of the CAP rules and that meant upgrading our EAS systems. We wanted it to be consistent with our passive hub monitoring system.” Gray spent $3,800 to $4,500 for just the hardware, at each of the company’s 36 TV stations. “The installations are completed at nearly all of our stations,” Ocon said: “There may be one or two left. We'll be fully compliant by the deadline” on June 30.

A promising next step for the industry would be to extend the protocols to mobile DTV, Ocon added. Gray’s four stations broadcasting mobile DTV could make the transition with just a software update. “As we wait for consumer devices to hit store shelves, a really great use of this technology would be to include CAP or EAS on mobile devices,” he said. “Some in the Southeast just had houses thrown off their foundations by tornados. From an early warning perspective, something like this is very valuable. The same system can be used to transmit AMBER Alerts.”