When cell networks went dark for weeks during recent disasters, radio stations kept broadcasting emergency alerts throughout. That track record now anchors the NAB’s response to portions of a major FCC proposal, which it says could undermine EAS reliability.
The comments, filed August 29, respond to the FCC’s Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on EAS modernization, released in June as part of a broader Report and Order that separately imposed new cybersecurity mandates on stations, including a September 29 password and firewall compliance deadline.
This latest filing addresses a different set of proposals still under consideration, not yet adopted as rules.
At the center of it is NAB’s long-running campaign to let stations run EAS on software rather than dedicated hardware boxes, an idea the group first petitioned the FCC to consider in March 2025 and that the Commission formally opened for rulemaking in June. NAB says a software approach would let stations patch security problems and add new capabilities remotely, instead of scheduling an engineer to visit every physical EAS box in a group’s footprint.
Even so, NAB drew a firm line against a fully cloud-based system. The group wants EAS software confined to what it called “a trusted source running on curated hardware,” warning that a cloud-dependent model could leave stations unable to relay alerts during the kind of power and internet outages that have hit disaster zones repeatedly in recent years. NAB pointed to four-day cell outages during the 2023 Maui wildfires, nearly two weeks of dead cell service in parts of North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and up to three weeks without service in some Louisiana parishes after Hurricane Ida, noting broadcasters stayed on the air through all three.
NAB also pushed back on the FCC’s plan to cut the window for repairing defective EAS software from 60 days to 72 hours. The group called that timeline unrealistic, noting stations typically review EAS test logs only weekly, making a problem unlikely to surface within three days, and that some software issues trace back to underlying hardware that can take longer to diagnose and fix.
On other proposals, NAB backed digital signature authentication for alerts and voiced no objection to a universal alert identifier meant to cut down on duplicates, though it said duplicate alerts are rare in practice, tied mostly to edited alerts from low-power stations or overlapping signals near mountainous terrain. NAB was more cautious on tightening geotargeting with circles and polygons, warning the legacy alert format cannot cleanly translate that data down to the county level.
For radio specifically, NAB flagged requiring visual symbols on EAS alerts as a tougher fit than for television. Generating and displaying image files is more complex for radio than TV, the group said, and results would vary widely depending on a listener’s receiver, including HD Radio displays in car dashboards. NAB asked the FCC to make symbols optional for radio, not mandatory.
