FCC to Delay CAP Implementation Half Year to Sept. 30
The FCC will postpone by a half year the deadline for broadcasters and cable operators to be able to pass along emergency alerts using new standards from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said commission and industry officials. The deadline to implement Common Alerting Protocol at radio and TV stations and cable systems is 180 days after FEMA finalized CAP, which was Sept. 30, putting the deadline at the end of March. A draft FCC order likely to be finalized soon extends the time to Sept. 30, 2011, agency and industry officials said. The delay had been expected (CD Oct 5 p1).
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A draft Public Safety Bureau order had been approved by most of the commissioners by Friday, and it likely will be backed by the others without controversy, agency officials said. It could be issued as soon as this week, they said. The order responds to a request for a postponement of CAP implementation rules by a wide array of groups representing cable operators and commercial and nonprofit broadcasters. A bureau spokesman declined to comment.
The item mentions that the commission will also issue a rulemaking notice about how the finalization of CAP affects Part 11 rules on certification of emergency alert system (EAS) gear, agency officials said. It’s unclear when the notice may circulate or be approved. The CAP implementation draft order also notes that the regulator could further extend the period that the industries have to implement CAP by delaying the deadline in a future rulemaking, commission officials said.
"The co-petitioners would be thrilled if the commission would extend it by at least the six months that has been requested” in an Oct. 21 petition to expedite extension of the deadline, said lawyer Richard Zaragoza of Pillsbury Winthrop, who represents state broadcaster groups. He filed the petition for them and the American Cable Association, the Association for Maximum Service Television, the Association of Public Television Stations, the NAB, the NCTA, NPR, PBS and the Society of Broadcast Engineers. Zaragoza said he hopes the commission understands “there may be more time necessary” to implement CAP “depending on the outcome of any part 11 rulemaking.”
Part 11 rules deal with certification and testing of EAS gear, industry officials said. EAS rules “were not written to accommodate a CAP-based EAS and will likely require significant revision or replacement once CAP is adopted and implemented,” the bureau said in a March notice. That’s “even if CAP-formatted messages continue to be utilized in connection with the alert transmission architectures of the current or ‘legacy’ EAS,” it said.
A half-year postponement would “possibly” be enough time, “but the gears need to start moving quickly and efficiently” at the commission on Part 11 rules, said Senior Director Ed Czarnecki of Monroe Electronics, which makes equipment to encode and decode EAS for cable and broadcasters. “The commission hasn’t clarified the certification requirements for CAP EAS gear,” raising questions about whether existing EAS-certified equipment “needs to be recertified from scratch,” he said. “The act of converting a CAP message to EAS is by any other name EAS encoding,” so certification may be needed.
The new standards don’t seem to portend “radical changes” to Part 11 rules, said Harold Price, co-founder of EAS gear-maker Sage Alerting Systems. “The remaining open issues are very small and therefore easily handled,” added Price, the company’s president. “The changes that are coming up for Part 11 are going to be fairly minor,” he said, because “EAS is intended to work with the legacy systems, as it has for the past 15 years.”