WASHINGTON—An influential House Democrat said policy-makers should consider requiring wireless carriers and other communications service providers to participate in any overhaul of a Cold War-era emergency alert system.
At a hearing last Thursday, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House telecom and Internet subcommittee, said the current scheme of voluntary participation may not be advisable in light of the huge amount of federal dollars needed to revamp the existing public warning regime, whose age and limitations were exposed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and last year’s deadly hurricanes.
“I think it is appropriate to re-visit the voluntary nature of some pending proposals,” Markey said. “As bad as an unfunded mandate would be, it seems equally problematic to spend potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on a new alert system, and a new office in the government somewhere to administer it, and then indicate to industry that they don’t have to use it. This would represent a funded, non-mandate—the worst of all situations.”
Reps. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) and Albert Wynn (D-Md.) are lead sponsors of the Warning, Alert and Response Network Act, introduced earlier this month. Another emergency alert reform bill—championed by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and approved by the Senate Commerce Committee last December—is hung up in a partisan spat over whether a new national emergency alert office should reside in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, has been working with public TV operators, cellular carriers and others to develop a digital platform that wireless operators and others can tap to distribute warnings to consumers.
“During major events where we can give people warning and it’s coming down the pike, we ought to use all the technology available, and we shouldn’t hinder new technological development by dictating what that technology should be,” said Shimkus. “We want to make sure that when it’s used, it’s used appropriately. We need to make sure that those who make those decisions have been well trained, so you don’t get the `cry wolf’ syndrome and people disregard the alerts.”
The Shimkus bill devotes $106 million to expand the alert network and help coordinate a variety of government efforts to improve the systems. A separate deficit reduction bill last year earmarked $156 million to implement a national alert and tsunami warning system.
The Federal Communications Commission, meantime, has yet to complete a 2004 rulemaking to improve the emergency alert system.
Markey prefaced his remarks by noting cell-phone industry concerns about any new federal mandate in terms of cost and disruption to carriers and subscribers.
Rural mobile-phone operators are particularly fearful of a federal directive on emergency alert service.
“Rural wireless carriers do not have the resources to absorb a mandate that would require another `free’ change-out of wireless phones and another major network upgrade,” said the Rural Cellular Association in a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. “RCA’s CDMA and iDEN members are still working diligently to meet the 95-percent penetration level required for enhanced-911 Phase II and RCA’s GSM members are aggressively working to replace analog and TDMA handsets. A new EAS mandate that would require yet another change-out of all wireless phones without government-funded cost recovery would prove to be financially catastrophic to small and regional rural wireless carriers.”
Short-term SMS
The wireless industry regards short message service—used today to deliver Amber Alerts and other types of text communications—as a near-term solution, while noting the technology’s limitations for massive delivery of wireless emergency alerts.
For the long term, carriers envision government-industry collaboration on technological, operational and administrative aspects of a comprehensive, permanent solution. Such a process was embraced when carriers rolled out wireless priority service.
“Developing a national emergency alerting policy should not be a one-time event. Going forward, there should be a continuous process for identifying the emergency alert environment and merging it with industry capabilities,” said Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president for regulatory affairs at wireless industry trade association CTIA.
The House telecom and Internet subcommittee last Thursday heard from industry witnesses, the FCC and the Maryland Sheriff’s Association. No one testified from DHS, which recently received broader emergency alert powers from President Bush, or from the department’s FEMA unit.
However, representatives from DHS and the Wisconsin state government were present last Wednesday at a meeting in Appleton, Wis., on the upcoming launch early next month by GSM operator Einstein PCS of a pilot wireless emergency alert program based on cell broadcast technology. Cell broadcast has been endorsed in Holland, South Korea and other countries, and is being considered for adoption by the European Union.
The RCA told Martin neither SMS nor cell broadcast would work for its members because both technology solutions “would result in an inferior emergency alert service that has no commercial application and have a very high cost.” Instead, RCA urged policy-makers to examine other emerging technologies with broadcast capabilities, such as multimedia broadband multicast service, Qualcomm Inc.’s MediaFLO, new approaches using Internet Protocol technology as well as the integration of NOAA digital public alert radio technology.
