Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Integrated Public Alert and Warning System don't believe the use of automated or mechanical parsing to compose 90-character messages is appropriate, they said about proposed FCC rule changes for wireless emergency alerts to mobile phones, during a meeting with officials from the FCC Public Safety Bureau, recounted a filing. “In no case should the IPAWS system be responsible for this function,” they said. “FEMA believes that parsing a 90 character message from a 360 character message should be done by the alert originator.” The IPAWS officials also said devices should continue the practice of identifying the message “by whatever means dictated by the carrier” to eliminate duplicate messages. Carriers' approach on 90-character versus 360-character messages depends on future rules, IPAWS said. “Carriers will most likely push 90 character messages to legacy networks and 360 character messages to 4G LTE networks.” The FCC proposed at its November meeting to allow longer WEA messages, inclusion of hyperlinks and narrower distribution of alerts (see 1511190053). FEMA's filing was posted Friday in docket 15-94.
Public TV stations have the capacity to connect public safety officials with each other and the public, said America's Public Television Stations CEO Patrick Butler and officials from CPB and PBS in a meeting Thursday with Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson and bureau staff, according to an ex parte filing posted Tuesday. Next-generation 911 should take advantage of this capacity, the officials said. APTS member stations “pledged in principle to devote 1 Mbps of digital capacity by public television stations for participation in the FirstNet public safety network,” the filing said (see 1602220069). Public media can play a role in “educating individuals in communities before and after EAS [emergency alert system] and WEA [wireless emergency alert] testing and in convening community entities who can contribute to the relevance of the testing.”
The FCC Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council unanimously approved recommendations from five working groups Wednesday on 911 call rerouting and the security of communications systems. FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief David Simpson assigned CSRIC the task Wednesday of forming an additional working group on security best practices for services using the Wi-Fi spectrum band. Four other CSRIC working groups reported progress toward completing recommendations due before the current CSRIC mandate ends in March 2017.
Microsoft officials said they met with FCC Public Safety Bureau staff, at staff request, about the logistics of wireless emergency alerts. The FCC approved a notice at its November meeting looking at potential changes to WEA rules (see 1511190053). “No efforts to improve the system, however well-intentioned, should in any way detract from or interfere with achieving the primary goal of the WEA system which is to alert users to imminent life-threatening circumstances without delay,” Microsoft said. “Minimizing delay is imperative because mere seconds can be critical in some emergencies.” Delays are possible if carriers transmit multi-segment messages, Microsoft said. URLs embedded in alerts also could cause problems, the company said. “If the alert contains an embedded URL, clicking on that URL will dismiss the alert,” Microsoft said. “Assuming the message history memory is not full, emergency alerts dismissed by Windows Phone users remain in their message history just like a text message and can be retrieved from that location for purposes of accessing the URL. We noted that consumers would need to know to look in their message history in order to return to the URL.” Microsoft filed a notice on the meeting in docket 15-91.
Broadcasters from 10 states on Thursday told FCC officials of the importance of activating FM chips in smartphones, a perennial issue for the industry, and about some emergency alert system (EAS) concerns. A meeting with Chief David Simpson and others in the Public Safety Bureau was part of NAB's fly-in to lobby (see 1602260038) the FCC that day (see 1602250038), an association spokesman confirmed. At the EAS/FM chip meeting, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, Oregon and Washington State broadcaster association representatives said Simpson's backing of industry negotiations "led to the activation of FM chips in mobile phones offered by three of the four major wireless carriers, and continued industry efforts toward further increasing the availability of radio-enabled smartphones." AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile offer or are moving to offer devices with the chips activated, Commissioner Ajit Pai has said. Verizon didn't immediately comment Monday. On efforts to allow access to emergency information in languages other than English, broadcasters said there are "various risks concerning technology, accuracy and liability that raise obstacles to translating EAS alerts at the EAS Participant-level," said an NAB filing on the meeting, posted Monday in docket 04-296. It said those concerns are "as opposed to passing through multilingual EAS alerts that are created and disseminated by EAS alert originators." More such ex parte filings will be made in coming days on the broadcaster fly-in meetings, said the NAB spokesman.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its Integrated Public Alert and Warning System division are working toward a national test of the emergency alert system to take place Sept. 28, said an FCC ex parte filing documenting Monday's 2016 EAS forum and posted Wednesday in docket 15-91. The forum included representatives of state broadcasting associations and Public Safety Bureau staff including Chief David Simpson. The National Weather Service is close to being able to receive non-weather emergency alerts, the filing said. The NWS could do such alerts now, but is concerned about duplicate EAS alerts, the filing said. At the forum, Simpson discussed the recent FCC NPRM on improving EAS, and told the group that the proposed rules had the support of all four regular commissioners. The forum also discussed further modifications to state EAS boards, and a multilingual EAS pilot program.
The FCC voted 3-2 Thursday to launch a rulemaking (see 1602160072) seeking comment on numerous changes to set-top box rules intended to make it easier for third parties to build and sell retail set tops that can access pay-TV content. Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O’Rielly as expected (see 1601280066) opposed the proposal, which they said was “slanted” and an unnecessary regulatory intrusion. “I’m confident that most consumers would rather eliminate the set-top box altogether,” Pai said.
The Obama administration’s FY 2017 proposal would include funding to continue FCC headquarters relocation and to overhaul the agency’s IT systems, with money for what it calls a geospatial information system solution. Tuesday's proposal also includes provisions on auctioning the 1675-1680 MHz band and calls for an FTC transaction fee change for especially expensive deals.
The U.S. is still attempting to develop more-modern early warning systems for natural disasters -- such as earthquakes -- that use new technologies to reach mobile devices and connected devices within the IoT, experts said Tuesday during a White House summit on earthquake resilience. Panelists were optimistic about the pace of innovation on early warning, and said it's important to rethink the warning process to reach more individuals through mobile technologies, as opposed to traditional radio and TV early alerts.
Despite unanimous votes to extend online public file rules to pay-TV carriers and radio stations and for an NPRM on improving the nationwide emergency alert system, there were still some party-line divides over the items, based on commissioner statements afterwards. The items were adopted largely as expected (see 1601080047 and 1601210055). The public would have been "outraged" by the original version of the EAS NPRM system because it contemplated extending EAS regulations to the Internet, said Commissioner Mike O'Rielly. Commissioner Ajit Pai said the FCC didn't quite go far enough to ease the burden of online public file on smaller entities, though he conceded the commission did "cut them slack." There "was a lot of back and forth" in the lead up to the items, said Chairman Tom Wheeler.