SES to Carry OnSat Service Weekly During Transition
SES Americom will carry satellite integrator OnSat’s transponder service week-to-week until OnSat moves to another satellite provider, an OnSat spokesman told us Friday. SES’s contract with OnSat expired June 30. FCC interventions led SES to extend service twice. A fourth extension was to end Friday. To keep serving OnSat, SES Americom had to move it from AMC 2 to AMC 4.
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OnSat said it served the Navajo Nation using an SES transponder -- an arrangement undone when OnSat didn’t pay because the Universal Service Administrative Co. hadn’t paid for service to tribal libraries. The Navajos were approved for E-Rate money, but payment lagged while USAC investigates whether the tribe obeys its rules.
As OnSat works to move its service to another provider, it remains worried about the effect on the Navajos of decreasing satellite connectivity, OnSat President Dave Stephens told us. “The Navajo Nation will ‘get by’ with less than satisfactory connectivity.”
Some of 70 Navajo Chapter house libraries once dependent on E-Rate money to pay for their satellite connectivity have decided to pay for it on their own, Stephens said. He blames USAC for Navajo jobs lost when satellite connectivity was shut off, he said. USAC has “done the exact opposite of what it has been tasked to do and that is to help pay for connectivity at schools and libraries in one of the poorest and remote places in the United States,” he said.
USAC last paid OnSat for serving the Navajos in June 2007, when OnSat received more than $1.6 million. But the money covered video conferencing equipment, not satellite connectivity using SES’s transponder, an OnSat spokesman told us. The Navajo Nation repeatedly has asked USAC to explain in writing what information USAC needs to judge its compliance.
Others also were caught in recent problems between SES Americom and OnSat. All OnSat customers, many of them state and local safety agencies, use the same transponder. SES’s threat to shut off service for nonpayment threatened all of them. None receive universal-service funds, an OnSat spokesman told us. OnSat has made partial payments to SES to cover its customers that don’t get E-Rate money, he said.