Martin Says Committee Must Make Cellphone Alerts Targeted
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Wednesday that emergency alerts on cellphones should target smaller areas than just counties. Martin briefly attended a meeting of the Commercial Mobile Service Alert Advisory Committee and urged the group to give that issue special attention as it prepares to vote on a final report to the commission.
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The committee, established by the FCC at the direction of Congress in the Warn Act, is to complete work on the report in the next few weeks, with final approval expected at an Oct. 3 meeting. The report will lay out the technical details for a system for alerting the public to emergencies through messages broadcast to cellphones. Carriers won’t be required to participate, but most are expected to upgrade their systems so they can broadcast the alerts.
“I know this issue has been raised with the commission by some folks on the Hill,” Martin said. “I think this is a critical issue. I'm certainly concerned about saying that there would be no other requirement beyond the county level because of the potential impact… Maybe this is the one issue that we can ask the group to go back and try to address on a very short time frame.”
Billy Pitts, president of government affairs at NTI Group and a member of the committee, said better-targeted messages would be appropriate. “For a larger urban area, a county would encompass too many people and we obviously want to focus our message to those more at risk rather than a larger population,” Pitts said. “I hear there are technology constraints but it’s an area that really ought to be looked at quickly.”
Pitts cited as an example broadcast of a warning message to all of a carrier’s subscribers in Long Island, N.Y. Unless messages are more targeted, some urban areas may oppose use of the technology, he said. “You would be grabbing multi-millions of people,” he said. “Maybe in New York they want to focus on a water main break or a specific area that they're trying to really limit their calling to those who are at risk.”
Martin said he was sympathetic on this point. “I certainly think that we don’t want to set up a system in which large urban areas are unwilling to use it because of this concern,” he said.
Brian Daly of AT&T, leader of the committee’s Communications Technology Group, told Martin messages sent to smaller areas may be difficult to deliver. “If you take a map and draw a polygon or a circle it’s challenging to figure out what cellsites are covering that circle or polygon on a real time basis,” he said. “The technology needs to be evaluated to see what can be done in order to get down to those geographic areas.” Daly said his working group has “wrestled” with the issue. “We understand the need to get down to smaller areas,” he said. “However, the operator consensus is that the county level for initial deployment at least seems to be the most efficient.”
Other areas of concern remain. Among them is that technology for detecting and broadcasting a warning on cellphones takes a toll on battery life, cutting average life by 40 percent or more. But the drain can be minimized depending on such factors as how often a message is retransmitted and the complexity and frequencies of alerts.
Martin said the committee appears “well on track” to submitting a report to the FCC in early October. “I want to tell you how encouraged everyone at the commission is by the work that you all have done,” he said. “This was an extremely accelerated timeframe that was required of everyone here to work through these issues and develop a set of recommendations.”