Nearly 30 years ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the wireless trade association CTIA, started a conversation about the need for wireless location-based services. It wasn’t until 1988 that the FCC agreed on the ruling to require wireless carriers to enable subscriber location tracking through cell towers to be used for emergency response systems— and it would take yet another 10 years before we saw the advent of the “text message” and another 14 years for emergency alerting to become what it is today in our hyper-mobile world.
The Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system was officially launched in June of 2012 to provide a standardized way for public safety officials to deliver text message warnings to the public during an emergency. Within a few months of launching the WEA system, several news stories highlighted its success. These stories told of hundreds of kidnapped children being recovered, towns avoiding severe weather disasters and the public assisting in the capture of a bombing suspect during an unprecedented manhunt. By October of 2013, 98% of wireless consumers in the U.S. were actively participating in the WEA initiative, stated Christopher Guttman-McCabe, who was executive vice president of CTIA at the time.[1]
Several government agencies, public officials, scientists, technologists and developers met last year to discuss updating the WEA system. In September 2016, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it had adopted new rules to enhance and strengthen WEA and develop a testing program to improve its effectiveness. The updated rules included the following[2]:
The FCC’s timeline for implementing these enhancements has been met with some hesitation from carriers and wireless groups. At the time of its release, CTIA stated, “While we support efforts to enhance this important voluntary system, we are concerned that the FCC’s technically unrealistic timeline adopted today may impede the delivery of emergency alerts.”
Due to the fact that WEA is a voluntary program, the FCC cannot force carriers to participate. Yet the system and its proposed improvements are about public safety and not providing this service puts US citizens at risk when they are most vulnerable. If anything, events over the last year should prove that the benefits of these updates far surpass the costs of implementing them. It’s been a really rough year for countless Americans who have experienced devastating weather conditions that have resulted in 282 deaths[3]. Damaging wildfires in the West, droughts in the Mid-West, record-breaking hurricanes and tropical storms in the South, severe freezing in many Central, Eastern and Northeastern states, and tornados in the Southern Plain states, along with flooding, hail storms, and more[4].
As a leader in providing cloud-based managed services to Commercial Service Providers, Interop Technologies has been committed to helping wireless carriers quickly implement and easily adhere to WEA regulations and compliance. We believe that together, we can help make our country safer during an emergency.
If you’re a mobile subscriber looking for more information on WEA, check out FEMA’s frequently asked questions here.