A group of independent EAS stakeholders is urging the FCC to grant its request to extend the deadline for purchasing and installing Common Alerting Protocol Enhanced EAS (CAPEAS) receivers. The action—in the form of a petition filed with the FCC— comes nearly two months after the commission started its 180-day clock for the mandate, and over a month since the NAB petitioned for an extension.
The petition states that CAP-EAS “has not yet been fully fleshed out, certified, tested and validated on a large scale by the agency that has the overall responsibility for it, the Federal Communications Commission.” The group has asked the commission to take several issues into consideration before the thousands of broadcasters, cable and satellite providers and other distributors of entertainment and information providers nationwide are required to receive CAP v1.2 Standard formatted Emergency Alert System (EAS) messages.
Among the still unresolved issues are the need for greater involvement of Special Needs individuals and the Department of Justice for AMBER messaging, logging and discrepancy reporting certification, emergency management buy-in, governor mandatory EAS messaging, compression standards for CAPEAS attachments, reinforcement of IP distribution for CAP-EAS messages, CAP-EAS compatibility with
National Weather Service warnings, and state and local EAS plan rewrite challenges.
The petition has been circulated to other key EAS stakeholders and has already received favorable reviews from Jim Gabbert, Chair of the California EAS State Emergency Communications Committee and Suzanne Goucher, Chair of the Maine SECC. The Petition can be downloaded from the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (EFCS) website or can be sent to interested parties by emailing Richard Rudman, vice chair of the California SECC at Rar01@mac.com.
Current members of the IEASS include Rudman, Adrienne Abbott, Chair of the Nevada SECC, Clay Freinwald, Chair of the Washington State SECC and Barry Mishkind, Editor and Publisher of the Broadcast Desktop Resource.
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