2017 Nationwide Test Report Shows Emphasis on CAP Polling, Reporting Errors

The FCC Public Safety Bureau is acting to increase the use of the Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) to propagate emergency alert system warnings, rather than the legacy “daisychain” system, said the bureau’s report on the 2017 Nationwide EAS test, released Friday. The internet-based CAP (common alerting protocol) alerts sent through IPAWS contain more information, have better audio and allow multi-language alerts, the report said. The test shows EAS participants have “improved in their ability to successfully alert the public,” the report said, though it also shows a drop from 2016 in test participation, and a Federal Emergency Management Agency report on the nationwide test released last week questioned the accuracy of the results reporting.

About 96 percent of test participants successfully received the test alert, up from 95.4 percent in 2016, the report said, and 91.9 percent retransmitted the test alert, up from 85.8 percent in 2016. The report shows a decrease in participation, with 19,738 unique filings in 2017 compared with 21,365 for 2016. “This reduction in filings may have resulted from several factors, including severe weather and wildfires during summer and fall of 2017,” the report said. “Many EAS Participants that filed in 2016 but failed to file in 2017 are located in states affected by the 2017 hurricanes.” Radio broadcasters “had an above-average participation rate” of 78.5 percent compared with TV broadcasters, which had the lowest participation rate of 68.5 percent, the report said. EAS officials blamed low-power TV stations for dragging the TV broadcaster participation rate down. “Cable system, IPTV, and wireline video system participants had an improved participation rate of 74.0%,” up from 52.9 percent in 2016, the report said.

Both the 2017 and 2016 nationwide tests show about the same rate of EAS participants being triggered by the legacy system versus IPAWS, the report said. To address the issue and make the higher quality IPAWS alerts more prevalent, the report repeats the FCC’s endorsement of “triggered CAP polling,” wherein EAS equipment spends a few seconds checking for a more information-rich IPAWS alert after being triggered by a legacy alert. If an IPAWS alert is found, such a system would proceed with the internet-based alert. The FCC clarified that triggered CAP polling was permissible for some EAS alerts with a few lines in the middle of its order on Blue Alerts (see 1711220048). Since the FCC’s clarification, EAS manufacturers have been working on equipment that will allow EAS participants to use triggered CAP polling, said Sage Alerting Systems President Harold Price and Monroe Electronics Senior Director-Strategy and Government Affairs Ed Czarnecki in separate interviews. The Public Safety Bureau will do outreach with state EAS committees, EAS participants and EAS equipment manufacturers to assess the extent to which CAP polling is available on EAS equipment, and if it's being used, an FCC spokesperson said.

The FCC’s endorsement of triggered CAP polling won’t increase the use of IPAWS in national EAS tests like the subject of the report because it doesn’t apply to presidential or nationwide alerts, said National Alliance of State Broadcaster Associations EAS Committee Chief Suzanne Goucher. The rules require nationwide and presidential alerts to be transmitted with “immediacy,” and it’s not clear that would be fulfilled by a pause of up to 30 seconds to check for an internet-based alert, Czarnecki said. Though the report said the bureau “will do outreach to EAS Participants and EAS equipment manufacturers and prepare options for the Commission regarding triggered CAP polling for Presidential alerts and tests,” EAS officials said they don’t expect CAP polling to expand to nationwide and presidential alerts any time soon. Such alerts are intended to work even when communications have been partially disrupted, which likely favors the more robust legacy system, they said. FEMA would have to be involved in any such change, the officials said.

FEMA “continues to have concerns regarding the quality of EAS Participant responses” in the FCC’s test reporting system, said FEMA’s own report on the 2017 test. That report includes seven instances of EAS participants claiming to have not received the test message but then somehow relaying it anyway, and apparently incorrect reporting of the source of the test alert by close to 70 participants. Video shows many TV stations that claimed to successfully relay the test message left out the audio, ran the wrong message or ran the EAS audio concurrent with their normal programming audio, making the test message difficult to hear, FEMA said. “FEMA recommends that the FCC establish guidelines for the required aural and/or visual components for a television station to claim successful relay of the test message,” the FEMA report said. Since the National Periodic Test (NPT) code is a stand-in for an emergency message from the White House, “it is no more appropriate to continue to play normal program audio during relay of an NPT message than it would be to mix normal program audio with an official live emergency message from the President of the United States,” FEMA said.