National Broadband Plan - Public safety elements - Alerting initiatives

It is the policy of the United States to ensure that all Americans, including people with disabilities and those who do not speak English, have access to a redundant, reliable, comprehensive public alert and warning system. To that end, one of the top priorities of the Federal Communications Commission has been to ensure that all Americans have access to emergency alerts irrespective of what communications technology they use. So in other words, if an alert originator were to issue a weather alert, a consumer should be able to receive that alert whether they are watching television with their families, sitting in their car listening to their radio, shopping with their cell phone or surfing the Internet. Currently, the main mechanism by which the President is able to send emergency alerts is through the Emergency Alert System, which is a media-based emergency alert system that includes broadcast radio and television, cable television, satellite radio and television, and wireline video service providers. In addition in 2008, the FCC established rules for a Commercial Mobile Alert System which will allow consumers to receive alerts over their cell phones and other mobile devices. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, otherwise know as FEMA, has been developing an integrated public alert and warning system which has the ultimate goal of leveraging a multitude of communications technology to send and receive alerts. The National Broadband Plan takes this to the next step by making two recommendations; one is that FCC initiate a comprehensive inquiry into the technical, legal, and policy issues surrounding a next generation multi-platform broadband-based alerting system. This inquiry would look at a multitude of issues including: potential broadband technologies that can be leveraged to send emergency alerts; examination of the EAS, the CMAS and the IPAWS to determine how broadband technologies can be used to leverage those systems; and third, what are the needs of state, tribal, and local governments so that they can utilize this next generation alerting system. The second recommendation is that the Executive branch clarify the roles and responsibilities of all federal agencies that have responsibility for alerting. This would include setting milestones, benchmarks and other actions that the federal government must take in order to not only develop but deploy this next generation alerting system. This would also include establishing a system of accountability to ensure that all federal agencies responsible for alerting are communicating and coordinating with each other. This last piece of the recommendation would also benefit American consumers by ensuring that they know which federal agency is responsible for which aspect of emergency alerting. This concludes this summary on the alerting initiatives of the National Broadband Plan. Thank you.