Public Safety Bureau Recommends Next Steps to Make Alerting Work Better
October’s nationwide emergency alerting test was mostly a success, though there were glitches, the FCC Public Safety Bureau reported Monday. The early read on the test was that most cellphones got the test wireless emergency alert and most broadcasters transmitted emergency alert system messages (see 1810030051), albeit with plenty of problems. The test was the first nationwide for WEAs. The report includes recommendation for making both wireless and broadcast alerts more effective, including a WEA database.
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“The nationwide test demonstrated that WEA is an effective alerting tool to rapidly disseminate emergency information to the public,” the report said. “Based on survey data shared with the Commission, most people reported successful receipt of the WEA test message, with several news reports noting the success of the nationwide test.”
The bureau said not everyone was satisfied. The FCC received 316 responses through the week after the test. Sixty-one percent reported “no problems” receiving the WEA test message, and 39 percent said they either didn’t receive an alert or had issues including “receipt of multiple messages or problems with the tone or vibration cadence,” the bureau said.
The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau received 36 complaints about the nationwide WEA test, the report said. “Fourteen complaints offered relevant information regarding the success of the test, two complaints involved EAS issues not related to the national test, and the remainder offered non-substantive political comments.”
The New York City Emergency Management Department surveyed people living in that area and found that of the 2,351 who responded, 81.4 percent received an alert on their phones, the bureau noted. Everbridge, which sells alerting software, did a national survey with 3,500 responses, the bureau said. Some 83 percent of respondents said they received the WEA alert on their smartphone and 15 percent didn’t, the report said.
To make WEA work better, the bureau recommends the FCC consider a WEA database providing information for alert originators on the availability of WEA within their jurisdictions. The agency could also explore with states and local governments “alternative means for gathering and assessing data regarding WEA delivery,” the report said.
The bureau will work with wireless carriers serving Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands “to encourage and facilitate their election to participate in WEA” and will “conduct outreach to wireless providers to ensure the presence and delivery of the required WEA audio tone and vibration cadence to ensure that such alerts are accessible to individuals with disabilities.”
The report demonstrates the success of the national WEA test and “reaffirms that WEAs are one of our most effective public alert and warning tools,” said Matt Gerst, CTIA vice president-regulatory affairs. Public safety groups and the NAB didn't comment.
The 2018 test saw 95.7 percent of recipients receive the alert, essentially the same as 2017 test, with participants up, according to the bureau. Overall success rate for retransmission was 92.1 percent, it said, and 90.5 percent of wireline video systems were able to retransmit, compared with 93.8 percent in 2017. It said TV broadcasters still show below-average success rates, with 89.5 percent receiving the alert and 84.5 percent retransmitting it, though slightly improved from 2017. Retransmission rates for low-power FM and LPTV broadcasters fell.
While 95.1 percent of EAS test participants reported no receipt complications and 97.4 percent no retransmission complications, the biggest issues when there were complications involved equipment configuration, equipment failures, out-of-date software or user errors, the bureau said. It said for people with disabilities, there were some reported issues with text crawls often reported as being too fast to be readable, overlapping with closed captioning and displayed with bad color contrast. It said those issues largely mirrored issues in the 2017 EAS test. Conversely, 344 test participants reported audio quality issues with alert receipts or retransmissions, compared with 1,056 in the 2017 test, it said.