Wireless Carriers Noted Some Problems in National WEA Test
The three major national wireless carriers reported problems during the recent nationwide wireless emergency alert test, but they said the system mostly worked as expected. The FCC posted reports from Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T Thursday, in docket 15-94. Some glitches were observed during the test earlier this month (see 2108110067). In the first national test in 2018, many alerts didn’t go through (see 1812210056).
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.
The FCC is still examining “the WEA survey results from our partners and now this input from the wireless providers,” a spokesperson said. The FCC said in July it’s working with 11 federal, state and local agencies to assess the delivery (see 2107200032). Unlike the 2018 test, alerts were directed only to consumer phones where the subscriber has opted in to receive test messages.
Verizon observed that “several cell sites restarted at various times during the duration of the alert.” Once notified, the gateway “sent the alert to these cell sites for broadcast,” the provider said: “Although these cell sites were late to broadcast the alert, the customer impact should be minimal due to cell coverage redundancy built into Verizon’s network.” When a site is temporarily unavailable, devices would “be served by other nearby cell sites, including receipt of the alert broadcast,” the company said: “The device would ignore the later alert broadcast of the restarted cell site as a duplicated alert.”
After the test, Verizon said it examined the data “from the various network elements to identify any evident irregularities or any deviations from our WEA performance benchmarks and found none.” Anecdotal reports suggest “some devices in a particular residence or workplace presented the alert while others did not,” the carrier said, noting some customers may have misunderstood how to opt in to receive alerts.
AT&T said it received the nationwide test message and is “confident we transmitted the alert to all geographic areas.” Because of reporting issues, AT&T doesn’t have “substantiating data” from its broadcast message center “but anecdotal data … leads us to believe that the alert was transmitted successfully to all geographic areas.” The carrier said it's working with a vendor to obtain any relevant data.
AT&T asked employees in 37 cities in 16 states to enable the test alert on a variety of devices. Testing found a “99.07% completion rate for the delivery of the WEA,” the carrier said: “On the day of the test, anecdotal information suggests that the test alert was received twice by some users. We believe we understand the reason and are working with the vendor to confirm the cause of this duplication.”
T-Mobile said it didn’t see any problems or “observe any measurable degradation in performance between its 3G, 4G and 5G networks.” The carrier had testers “monitoring more than 50 devices during the test and, even though real WEA alerts were initiated during the test in some areas of the country, no complications with alert processing or transmission were observed,” the carrier said. Unlike its peers, T-Mobile redacted some technical information, including the length of time it took to transmit messages and the number of times they were rebroadcast.