Likelihood of C-Band Earth Station Registration Revamping Unclear
The FCC fielded multiple requests for tweaking the requirements for registering C-band receive-only earth stations to help grease the path to registration, but it's not clear whether the agency will go that route, experts told us. With only a fraction of earth stations registered now, whether a significant percentage will end up registered similarly isn't clear. If the FCC can't get even a majority registered, it will be making rulings “on an invalid database," said Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) President Jim Leifer. "That’s my biggest concern.” The FCC didn't comment.
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The International Bureau Application Filing and Reporting System (IBFS) indicated Wednesday that 607 registration applications for earth stations in the 3.7-4.2 GHz band had been submitted since the registration window opened April 19 (see 1804200003). Leifer said it's likely 20,000-plus earth stations are in operation, but the expense and time to fill out and submit a Form 312 are a big hurdle for many earth station operators: “It’s cost painful and it’s time painful." Echoed Mark Johnson, co-founder of satellite network design and installation firm LinkUp Communications, "We're still way short" and the number of C-band earth stations is “easily above 25,000," but SBE efforts are starting to drive more registration traffic. The filing window closes July 18.
The FCC indicated it can be flexible, but it also expressed frustrations there haven't been any operators that wanted to or tried to register but couldn't, and it may be difficult to act without such a complaint, said Intelsat Vice President-Investor Relations Dianne VanBeber. Intelsat -- which along with SES and Intel is proposing clearing some C-band for terrestrial wireless use -- and others have pitched a variety of fixes to the FCC (see 1805250003, 1805090026 and 1805100028). VanBeber said the idea of block registering all of an operator's earth stations in one Form 312 filing, instead of individual ones for each, seemed to show promise in FCC discussions.
With the need to file individual forms for each earth station site and the cost of the application fees potentially deterring many receive-only earth station operators from registering, Petra Vorwig, SES senior legal and regulatory counsel, emailed that the company is "hopeful that the Commission will recognize these obstacles and quickly implement an approach that will encourage more operators to register their receive-only antennas."
The FCC seems sympathetic to the issues raised but doesn't seem to have committed to any particular action in response, Johnson said. He said the Form 312 in many cases is filled out by radio and TV station broadcast engineers who have familiarity with Media Bureau forms but not the terminology and details of 312. The cost -- $435 per form -- can be a sizable expense for small and big operators, he said.
When broadcasters and cable head-ends started using C-band in the early 1980s, most users did register their earth stations because AT&T was also using the band for microwave transmissions, Johnson said. Once AT&T started decommissioning those microwave facilities later that decade and moving to terrestrial fiber, the motivation for registering those earth stations dropped because interference and coordination issues became not pressing, he said.
An FCC official said there haven't been recent discussions among all the commissioners' offices about any changes, but when the window opened April 19, some of those concerns were discussed and the International, Wireless and Public Safety and Homeland Security bureaus indicated if parties had trouble making the 90-day deadline they would be amenable to extending it. In the public notice, the agency cited "a potentially unnecessary economic burden" when it waived the frequency coordination requirement. The FCC official said the agency has acted on its own in the past to extend deadlines or grant flexibility, and could do so in the C-band earth registration, but it likes to have at least a request made or more demonstration of hardship when doing so.
Not all earth station operators see the registration process as unduly onerous. It's "no more or less painful than anything else we have to do" on FCC compliance and regulation, said Mike Dowdle, general counsel, Bonneville International. "We have a constant diet of filings ... for one reason or another" and a cost like the earth station registration prep work done by a consulting engineer "is the cost of doing business," he said. Dowdle said complaints about the process might be more common among smaller operators less used to such regulatory processes. The broadcaster has registered its Seattle C-band receive-only earth station, according to the International Bureau filing system, with others still to be registered, Dowdle said.