[EAS] [BC] What's the point of LP-1s anymore?

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Mike, I've had good experience with local/regional ad-hoc networks... mostly for longer-form public information during the recovery phase (Virgin Islands 1995, North Dakota 1997) as well, of course, as for regional college football back in Ohio in the 70s.  EAS doesn't support that sort of longer-than-two-minutes state/local content, though.

As for public alerting... the problem is that analog EAS is no longer equivalent digital origination... particularly for the deaf and hearing-impaired who are ill-served by the 'canned' TV crawls.  (And don't get me started on audio-quality complaints!)  Not to mention that it's harder to train and maintain skills in the mechanics of analog origination than it is for the business of filling in a form on a screen... which is something so many of us now do routinely in our day-to-day lives.

I absolutely agree with you that whenever we rely on public commercial telecom infrastructure, be it cellphones or the Internet, we're playing Russian roulette with congestion effects.  Over the years we've done a lot to harden our cellphone connectivity, but we've yet to do as much for the Internet.

Then again, "digital" is not always synonymous with "Internet."  We have a lot of states that use satellite data links, and even some with terrestrial microwave and data-radio networks for alerting.  That, I'd say, is the model for devolved public alerting in the 21st century.  I find it hard to recommend doubling down on analog EAS, though... we can maybe defer the transition to digital for a couple of years, yet, but in the long run I'm afraid that's just energy wasted on the functional equivalent of whale-oil lamps.

(And please folks... if any of you actually are maintaining whale-oil lamps in your inventory... do us a favor and don't say it out loud, ok?)

Art