Industry cautions FCC against complicating Wireless Emergency Alerts

The CTIA is among wireless industry stakeholders cautioning the FCC against complicating the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system with additions of multimedia content and other requirements, which the CTIA told the Commission remains "fraught with practical and technical challenges."

The organization's latest comments on the matter, filed this week, are in response to the FCC's notice of proposed rulemaking issued in April, and a further notice of proposed rulemaking released in June, on reforming the WEA system. Comments on the latter notice were due this week.

The FCC's proposed reforms to the WEA system, which warns people of severe weather events and other emergencies, include:

The FCC also asked in its latest rulemaking notice whether and how to improve the system to accommodate sign language, and whether WEAs can support text-to-speech functionality "to accommodate individuals with vision disabilities."

As FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in a note in April, the need for language translation was a key driver for the proposed WEA rule changes, after emergency alerts were unable to reach immigrant communities in New York during Hurricane Ida in 2021. According to the FCC, sending alerts in only English or Spanish leaves out approximately 26 million people in the US who don't speak either.

"...New York State Attorney General Letitia James ... brought to our attention how expanded multilingual alerting can save lives ... she highlighted how during Hurricane Ida nearly all of those who lost their lives in rising floodwaters in New York spoke languages other than English and Spanish. The Wireless Emergency Alerts never reached this population," wrote Rosenworcel. "She called on us to do more and noted how the New York City Emergency Management Department has developed an application that provides alerting in English and 13 other languages. It proves if we are creative we can find a way to do this—and we can save more lives."

Creative but complicated

Reply comments on the rulemaking proceeding, including those from New York State's Public Service Commission, suggest that the FCC's well-meaning language proposal would face implementation hurdles.

For example, while the FCC suggested WEAs be translated into the 13 most commonly spoken languages besides English, New York State pointed out in comments this week that this doesn't account for localized differences in languages spoken. For example, while Bengali is the 17th most commonly spoken language in the US, it is the fifth most common in New York.

Instead, the FCC should "require WEAs to be translated to all languages spoken by at least 300,000 people, or 1%, of the United States population over 5 years of age" and "revisit this issue every three years to account for emerging immigration trends," according to New York.

Meanwhile, CTIA told the FCC this week it should encourage using "embedded links to immediately address consumer's needs for multilingual support consistent with the approach used in New York City to support many languages," which would allow for additional language support, including sign language, "while not changing the underlying system architecture."

That suggestion is similar to one offered by T-Mobile, which said in comments this week that more work is needed to improve translation technology.

"The record demonstrates the potential of device-based language translation software to convert WEA messages scripted in English into many different languages. However, the record also demonstrates that improvements to machine translations are necessary before they can become a solution for accurately translating WEA messages into numerous languages," said T-Mobile, adding that "the best way to provide access to translations of WEA messages is by utilizing embedded links provided by Alert Originators."

Verizon in its latest comments this week also told the FCC it should "take a targeted, user-focused, and technically feasible approach to enhancing the WEA system." Specifically, the company expressed support for efforts to expand language accessibility, noting "expanding the languages available to consumers via the WEA system through device level features is likely to provide the most benefit to consumers" of any other proposals. However, the operator noted this is a "nontrivial task" requiring industry and stakeholder cooperation.

"Resolving other issues raised in comments, however, such as prioritizing the languages to support and integrating the solution into the device, will primarily require input from device manufacturers, solution vendors, and alert originators themselves to both prioritize the available languages, and to create the content of alerts," said Verizon.

Possible performance issues

Another sticking point for wireless stakeholders is the idea of requiring certain multimedia content. Commenters including T-Mobile warned it "should not be included in the WEA broadcast channel due to capacity and performance issues," and that the FCC should "instead should allow alert originators to provide this content via embedded links."

Several commenters expressed concern about reducing the effectiveness of alerts with too many changes, with CTIA submitting research showing 83% of active smartphones receiving alerts this year, an increase from about 60% last year.

"While CTIA supports the Commission's commitment to reach more people in an emergency, and to do so more effectively, it agrees with commenters who caution against adopting proposals without thorough study, development, and testing," said the industry group.

According to the FCC, "more than 600 alerting authorities have used WEA more than 78,000 times" over the last decade.

Meanwhile, the FCC and FEMA announced earlier this month that they will issue a test of the WEA system at approximately 2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 4, in order to "ensure that the systems continue to be effective means of warning the public about emergencies, particularly those on the national level."

In a press release, the agencies further said the WEA test "will be directed to all consumer cell phones" and "will display in either English or in Spanish, depending on the language settings of the wireless handset." This is only the second such test to go to all cell phones, with the first one occurring in October 2018.