New EAS Alerts Distributed Online Draw Web Players’ Interest
Major websites are interested in getting emergency alert system feeds becoming available over the Internet now that the government and EAS participants are implementing a new format, federal officials and broadcasters said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s integrated public alert and warning system makes it possible for websites to get real-time access to EAS messages, noted FEMA IPAWS Director Antwane Johnson on an agency webinar late Wednesday. Traditional EAS participants in the broadcasting and pay-TV industries are getting ready for the Common Alerting Protocol message format that distributes the alerts online, which the FCC has required be able to be received and passed on starting at month’s end, FEMA and FCC officials noted.
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"Other private sector entities can monitor the EAS feed as a means of distributing EAS alerts via Internet services, for example Google, AOL, Pandora,” Johnson said. “And there are a number of others that are currently in negotiations with us.” FEMA’s IPAWS open platform for emergency networks is being frequently tested, Johnson and other government officials said. It’s meant to be a secondary means of distributing warning messages, Johnson and other FEMA officials said. Spokeswomen for AOL, Google and Pandora had no comment.
Microsoft may be among the other companies interested in getting access to alerts online, since they're becoming available in Internet Protocol format that websites can tap into, said Tennessee Association of Broadcasters President Whit Adamson. IP “gives us something to sell,” he said of the “public notices” that, because they're in IP, are “expected to save a lot of money in government.” CAP “gives us a lot of reason to talk about our new world, and not just the legacy systems,” Adamson said. Tennessee’s emergency management agency isn’t expected to initially send warnings in CAP, and will remain in EAS, he told us.
There ought to be interest among websites getting access to the IPAWS Internet feeds of other states that do switch to the new format, Adamson told us: But “you can’t always depend on that Internet” getting alerts to EAS participants. The primary entry point stations that get alerts directly from FEMA and whose broadcasts are received and passed on by other stations and pay-TV systems don’t always work without flaw, he noted. Adamson cited last year’s nationwide test of EAS (CD Nov 10 p2), the first ever, in which some PEP stations got bad audio in the feed from FEMA and then passed on that glitch to other EAS participants. Satellite feeds that EAS participants can tap into instead generally seem “pretty dependable and pretty good quality and pretty accessible,” Adamson said. Another nationwide EAS test hasn’t been scheduled, IPAWS Programs Manager Manny Centeno said on the FEMA webinar.
The FCC has found there can be “a single point of failure” in alerts being passed on by respective links in the daisy-chain of stations, said Public Safety Bureau Policy Division Associate Chief Greg Cooke. “Even though on paper this looks fine, you can see this single point of failure goes all the way down the track.” States with a “lot of hops using the classic EAS system” can have this problem, Cooke said. “We need to figure out a way of knowing going into the door that we don’t have these kinds of single points of failure” beyond the first local primary stations, he said. States that switch from traditional EAS to CAP must tell the bureau of the change, Cooke said. “While we believe CAP is the wave of the future, it is augmenting the systems that you already have in place,” he said. “This is just a new layer on the cake.” Twenty-four state and local governments are using IPAWS, Centeno said.
CAP doesn’t replace “traditional EAS” for “analog reception and the other monitoring sources,” and is “a complementary and an additional avenue to deliver the exact same alerts,” said IPAWS Deputy Director Wade Witmer. “There will probably be some learning as we implement CAP.” FEMA developed the format. All radio and TV stations and subscription-video providers and satellite-radio must be able to get and receive messages in CAP at month’s end, although many states and others that send warnings can’t yet originate messages in that format, government officials said. Traditional EAS will continue to be available.
The U.S. continues to add PEP stations that get the feeds directly from FEMA and then broadcast them to other EAS participants, Johnson said. There are 63 PEP stations running now, and by September there will be 77 covering 92 percent of the U.S. population, he said. State and local alerts can be sent to IPAWS and then cellphones, as carriers are gearing up to get the alerts, he said. Because the alerts are distributed online, EAS participants must have broadband access, said another FEMA official. A slide from FEMA recommended EAS participants have a connection of at least 1 Mbps, with “polling” of the CAP feed every 30 seconds. Most alerts will be about 10 kilobytes in size, “but then there’s always the one that has an attachment like an audio file” and those will be larger, a FEMA official said. FEMA estimates there will be about 250 alerts sent daily that on average will total 1 megabyte, the official said. FEMA has about 150 memorandums of agreement with companies developing alerting capabilities, Johnson said: “That’s a real plus for us, with the active engagement and involvement of the private sector” to “craft” and “distribute the warnings” all over the U.S.