FCC Orders Certain Satellite Operators To Report Outages

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today released an order modifying the reporting requirements for satellite outages. The rules apply only to voice and paging communications offered by satellite operators and satellite communications providers.

Under the order, these operators will be required to report any outages lasting more than 30 minutes involving the following key system elements: satellite transponders, satellite beams, inter-satellite links or the entire satellite. Operators running mobile satellite services also will be required to report any outage of more than 30 minutes duration at any gateway earth station.

Satellite communications providers will be required to report outages that involve more than 900,000 user minutes. In the order, the FCC said it recognizes that a fixed satellite service (FSS) operator “may not know that an outage is even occurring when it involved the failure in a service provider’s network that communicates with the FSS satellite. However, the satellite communications provider should know when such an outage occurs and should be responsible for reporting that outage just as other non-satellite communications providers are required to do.”