Experts Warn Outdated FCC Processes Are Slowing LEO Innovation And Urge Swift Passage of The SAT Streamlining Act

In case you missed it, on April 21, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing on the Satellite and Telecommunications (SAT) Streamlining Act. At the hearing, titled “Modernizing Satellite Licensing for the Final Frontier,” experts discussed how the legislation would reform the satellite licensing process at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with clearer deadlines and less red tape for the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite industry.

LEO broadband is rapidly transforming connectivity, strengthening everything from emergency response and disaster recovery to economic development, precision agriculture and expanded access to telehealth. However, outdated bureaucratic hurdles threaten to slow this progress, delay deployment and limit the full potential of these next-generation satellites. Regulatory bottlenecks like licensing delays sometimes last years and slow the launch of the thousands of new satellites that are needed.

Expert witnesses explained that policy reforms within the SAT Act, such as deemed-granted provisions, would reduce these delays, ensure predictable review timelines and enable faster rollout of LEO satellite networks.

Here is some of what industry experts had to say about the urgent need to modernize space policy to strengthen the economy, enhance public safety and national security, and help connect everyone, everywhere.

Tom Stroup, President, Satellite Industry Association: “Satellites are the backbone of modern society. We rely on them for communications, position navigation and timing and remote sensing across the globe. Satellites provide critical services to hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world every day… The current licensing regime was not designed for a world in which thousands of satellites are launched in a single year, and constellations are replenished on multi-year cycles. SIA applauds the FCC’s creation of the Space Bureau to provide additional resources and focus on our industry, as well as its ongoing space modernization for the 21st-century proceeding, which proposes to replace the legacy satellite rules with a new framework… With WRC-27 preparations now underway, and 80 percent of the agenda addressing space services and technologies, the stakes could not be higher.”

Kara Leibin Azocar, Vice President of Regulatory & Public Policy, Iridium, Communications Inc.: “To ensure that the satellite industry continues its rapid development of new and more robust offerings, it is essential that laws and regulations facilitate the evolutionary and revolutionary growth of the space industry, not inhibit it. Space is a bipartisan issue… Now, under the leadership of Chairman Carr, the Space Bureau has moved to reduce backlog and develop a comprehensive space modernization proposal. Iridium supports these initiatives. Prioritizing reforms through legislation will further ensure that future FCC administrations remain focused on rapid, carefully crafted decisions that will drive U.S. leadership in the evolving global space economy.”

Shiva Goel, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP: “[W]e have to recognize that long licensing timelines cost us much more than we think. We tend to measure the cost of regulatory delay in terms of extra capital burned, and maybe even a missed launch window. As intolerable as those costs may be, they pale in comparison to the losses we never see—the breakthroughs never attempted, the companies never formed, the architecture never designed because the regulatory risks and timelines prevented the economics from penciling in. The fact is, the more time a company has to budget for licensing, the less time and resources it has to innovate. And the way these timelines work in practice, if you can make a licensing practice take half as long, you can easily double or triple the amount of time people have left to build and iterate and improve what they’re doing, all while reducing uncertainty and risk. We can’t afford not to act…”

Kara Leibin Azocar, Vice President of Regulatory & Public Policy, Iridium, Communications Inc.: “A key piece of satellite streamlining and reforming the licensing processes for satellite licenses and Earth station licenses is regulatory certainty. And regulatory certainty occurs when licenses and applicants alike can feel confident in the rights that are being granted to them. Shot clocks or deemed granted provisions are key to speeding up the process…”

Shiva Goel, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP: “I actually think [startups] might be the biggest beneficiaries of this bill. Smaller companies in particular have much more to lose and are much more vulnerable from delay. They don’t have war chests. They need to show their investors and customer base that they have a license and that they’re ready to go, and they also need predictability and certainty about when they’re actually going to be able to operate… I would also add that smaller companies are also the most vulnerable to license denials, and if you had a situation where statutory deadlines were pushing the FCC to act on a complex application that wasn’t ready and it just denied an application, I think the big guys could probably survive that. I think some of the small ones would just go away.”

Tom Stroup, President, Satellite Industry Association: “[H]aving grown up in rural North Dakota, I understand that there are areas of the country that are just not going to receive broadband service unless it is provided by satellite companies. Given the tremendous amount of capacity that’s been deployed, the increase in the number of companies that are providing satellite-based broadband services, pretty much everybody in the country is going to have access to multiple broadband service providers.”

Kara Leibin Azocar, Vice President of Regulatory & Public Policy, Iridium, Communications Inc.: “Regulatory certainty through something like the SAT Streamlining Act, which gets fair, flexible, and stable licenses into the hands of new entrants, will enable not just satellite operators but also their partners to develop and deploy solutions that benefit the American consumer throughout the U.S. economy.”

Read the full text of the SAT Streamlining Act HERE and read what lawmakers have to say HERE.

Learn more about the SAT Streamlining Act HERE and HERE.

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