FCC Says Fixed Satellites ‘Subject to Effective Competition’
The fixed satellite services market is “subject to effective competition,” the FCC said Friday in its annual satellite competition report. “Consumers of communications satellite services continue to realize significant benefits in terms of service choice, innovations fostered by technological change and improvements in both space and ground segment, and improvements in service quality.”
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The report was set to be adopted at the FCC’s meeting last week in Nashville, Tenn., but like other items it was pulled from the agenda (CD Oct 16 p4). The report was adopted on circulation and released Friday. The Satellite Industry Association was pleased the agency “continues to focus on the unique dynamics underlying the satellite industry and that the report echoes the resilience our members are seeing in the sector,” said SIA President Patricia Cooper.
The report didn’t study the direct broadcast satellite market or the mobile satellite services market because the FCC reviews those markets as part of other congressionally mandated reports on video and wireless competition respectively, the agency said. Unlike its first report released last year (CD March 23 p9), this report doesn’t analyze the satellite radio market since the FCC in July approved the Sirius takeover of XM, thus reducing players in that market to one.
The FCC needs to adopt a definition for “effective competition” before it writes its various competition reports for Congress, Commissioner Michael Copps said. “While I recognize that a primarily wholesale market such as FSS raises unique competitive issues, industry and the public can still benefit from a clear definition of what the statutory term ‘effective competition’ means for such a market.”
The report “does a good job of describing methods of entry, cost structure and their implications for competition” in the FSS market, but it lacks “the level of data granularity that would normally be associated with such a competition report,” said Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. Copps also believes the second satellite competition report lacks enough detail on international competition.