The ball appears to be rolling at the Federal Communications Commission to allow radio stations to implement emergency alerting capabilities via software instead of hardware.
Representative of Sage Alerting Systems met with members of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau earlier this month to discuss potential “live” in situ testing of Emergency Alert System software by Sage, according to a filing from the manufacturer that included details of the meeting.
The FCC is taking a closer look at changes to EAS and Wireless Emergency Alerts, and has released a draft of a further notice of proposed rulemaking that, if adopted, would allow the use of EAS software by broadcasters if they choose.
It’s a development the National Association of Broadcasters and some radio broadcasters have been pressing for.
The FCC will consider the notice at its meeting on June 25.
The plan is still in the discussion stage, according to according to the Sage filing. The meeting included elements that would be important to include in a potential test plan, including duration, number of participants, data collection, measuring contention for resources on shared compute platforms, cyber security and engineering support.
“The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau emphasized the importance of maintaining a redundant non-test relay path in a given area’s EAS legacy relay design, and to that end, using only test areas where an approved FCC state plan is in effect,” Sage said in the filing.
The June meeting between Sage and the commission was a follow-up to a “possible next steps” discussion during a software EAS demonstration Sage participated in at the FCC’s headquarters in May.
In an interview this week, Radio World asked Sage President Harold Price for more details on what testing EAS software might involve and the implications of emergency alerting software for broadcasters.
RW: What was the purpose of the meeting at the FCC?
Harold Price: EAS broadcast from a device that is not Part 11 certified is not currently permitted. We started discussions on ways to do on-air software EAS tests before the FCC’s proposed rule making draft was circulated. Our intent was to show that software EAS was compatible with existing EAS systems in the field and could coexist with legacy devices.
While the draft shows the FCC is interested in discussing software EAS, Sage and others in the broadcast industry want to move forward with on-air testing. It will take several months to move from a draft to an actual report and order, and many questions will be asked and answered during that process. Practical experience will help bring the NAB’s 2025 petition to fruition.
RW: Is Sage free to start doing “live in situ” testing yet?
Price: We aren’t free to transmit EAS from a non-Part 11 device over the air. It is not yet clear which of several possible paths to live testing is the most appropriate here, that’s what we hope to learn from continuing discussions with the FCC. Monitoring and logging of EAS is permitted, however.
RW: What specific elements need to be part of a test plan?
Price: This is under discussion. Cybersecurity and interoperability with the existing system will be part of the discussion.
RW: The FCC seems to be taking pains to say it is open to putting EAS in software but not in the cloud. What are the implications of that philosophy?
Price: EAS has several roles, including support for locally issued warnings in the legacy audio format, and support for FEMA’s primary entry point system with relay of the National Emergency Message — what was once called EAN, or Emergency Activation Notification.
This infers the ability to receive in-market over-the-air alerts. There have been, and will be, outages in off-premises cloud services. Moving completely into the cloud can reduce the overall redundancy of EAS.
Sage firmly believes in maximizing redundant data paths in EAS. Note that there is a risk of conflating “the cloud” with “things that are connected via IP” and “LAN” vs “WAN.”
This will undoubtedly be part of the comment process for the notice of proposed rulemaking.
RW: Is this process specific to Sage? Is it intended specifically to help the company test its own approach, or are you talking here about a broader industry effort that would involve other stakeholders and potentially other suppliers?
Price: The discussion we’ve started with the FCC is specific to Sage; we don’t presume to speak for the industry. We are working with other companies to do this testing.
Orban Labs spoke out in favor of a live testing plan at the NAB show in Las Vegas this past April.
There may be a common test plan down the road. However, the actual protocols and procedures described in Part 11 define the EAS standard and will continue to do so; these are already well known.
The test plan currently under discussion is to give the FCC assurance that “software EAS” can be tested live without putting the day-to-day operation of the existing EAS ecosystem at risk.
Comment on this or any article. Email [email protected].
