SATELLITE COMPANIES RUSH TO BE FIRST IN APPLICATION QUEUE AT FCC
Satellite operators rushed the FCC in the wee hours of Wed. morning in seeking to be the first new applicants following publication of the space station licensing rules in the Federal Register. The new rules, adopted in April, established a queue for geostationary satellite orbit (GSO) and non-GSO (NGSO) applications (CD April 24 p6). The application freeze that was in effect could be lifted only by publication of the rules in the Federal Register. While the Commission hadn’t revealed when publication would be, FCC International Bureau (IB) Asst. Chief Thomas Sullivan said early applicants knew to look at the Federal Register preview on the Website or the IB Electronic Filing System (IBFS) site.
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Industry officials said the flood of filings wasn’t unexpected but said it was likely the rush was over. What will be interesting “is how quickly the FCC will be able to take the applications out of the queue and begin working on them,” Coudert Bros. analyst Timothy Logue said. The Commission had said earlier that it expected GSO licensing to take 180 days, NGSO licensing 270 days.
An FCC source said staff had remained at its hq until midnight or later to accept the expected barrage of applications. Mobile Satellite Ventures (MSV) was first with an application to launch a mobile satellite service (MSS) bird at 82 degrees W. “Not only are we the first in the queue, we're the first to apply under” the new rules, MSV Vp Lon Levin said. Because the order of the queue is determined down to the millisecond, MSV beat out Pegasus Development Corporation, Pegasus Communications subsidiary, by 15 hundredths of a second. By our deadline, the queue showed a total of 60 new applications within the first 40 minutes after midnight from 5 companies, 23 of them in the first minute. Sullivan said the queue would be updated regularly as applications were filed. Technically, he said, pending NGSO and GSO applications filed before the freeze were ahead of MSV because of their earlier filed status, so “the order that you're looking at [in the queue] is the actual order that they would be considered.”
Sullivan said the only obvious problem was the appearance of the applications: “You might see some of the orbit locations and frequency bands were not included in some of the applications. Through a technical glitch, they didn’t come out.” He said it wasn’t a problem for applicants to worry about and said staffers would have to go through each application to fix problems manually. The glitch in the system would have to be fixed separately, he said, as would future problems: “To the extent we can control things, we have taken deliberate measures to ensure our system is running.” Thomas said the Commission did its best answering questions from the public about the mechanics of filing, mentioning specifically recent inquiries from local attorneys about Commission servers (CD Aug 11 p10), and said most remaining issues had been resolved.
Satellite Industry Assn. (SIA) Pres. Richard DalBello disagreed, saying that while his group had been “working together closely with the FCC on all of these issues and we will continue to work with them… principle anxieties” remain. Most “controversial since it was proposed” is the requirement to post bond, he said: “We think that at $5 million (per satellite), that’s expensive. We're interested in looking at alternatives to the bond which would be an escrow account.” But requiring an escrow account, where a company puts the entire amount into an account at once, as opposed to posting a bond, which requires a sending a percentage of the money to a bond company, hurts new entrants even more, an industry official said: “If you're a member of SIA you can afford to put $10 million into an escrow account. The problem with the bonding requirement, and all the new rules, is that they have chilled out of the satellite markets the small players who aspire to be members of SIA.”
DalBello said the other concern was how other countries would react to the new rules: “If the FCC does this, what will other nations’ responses be?” He said U.S. licensees seeking access to other countries now might face similarly stringent requirements overseas. Petitions for reconsideration are due within 30 days, and while petitions to change the rules fundamentally could be filed, “it depends entirely on what the petitions are about. There are a lot of secondary issues that could be dealt with in a rolling fashion,” DalBello said. A satellite industry official said the FCC would be petitioned on the issue and it faced the potential for legal action. The argument could be that the queue method was a violation of the Communications Act, he said, in which case, early applicants would be affected: “Whoever files now in anticipation of getting a jump on somebody, [that application] is subject to a future court decision that invalidates the rules.”