[EAS] FCC NPRM on improving EAS just issued

[Sean Donelan]

On Tue, 2 Feb 2016, Alex Hartman wrote:
> I still contend that the CAP system needs to be de-centralized and have 
>several other aggregation systems to be fully effective and self-healing. 
>And i agree Ed, AFSK EAS shouldn't go anywhere quite yet. There's still 
>parts of this country where Internet is a luxury. They're few and far 
>between, but they're out there.

It's shouldn't be a choice between Internet or Radio, rather its between
analog and digital.  In 1989, narrowband, analog channels were dominate 
and EBS was still based on 1963 distribution model.

Now almost all national programming services over every medium use digital 
distribution.

Television, satellite radio and TV, a majority of cable use mostly 
digital distribution.   There is no reason to continue to hold back all 
the other communication channels to the lowest denominator narrowband, AM 
radio using AFSK.

If the FCC is thinking about the future of emergency alerts for the 
public, it should start changing to a primary (PEP) digital distribution 
through national satellite TV and radio programming services, over the air 
digital TV, digital cable systems, as well as digital Internet through 
out-of-band, digital protocols.

Again, this shouldn't be "only Internet."  Instead of "duck quacks" use 
digital protocols through Internet, cable, satellite and terrestrial 
free-to-air.  In-band AFSK over AM radio and NWS weather radio should be 
moved to the "tail" of the legacy distribution, not the core of the 
public alerting system.