FCC Grants PLMR Applicants Additional Relief, as Approval Backlog Continues
The after-effects of the federal shutdown are still being felt more than two months later. In an order released Friday, the FCC Wireless Bureau granted a temporary waiver sought by the Enterprise Wireless Alliance, which allows applicants for new or modified stations in the 470-512 MHz, 806-824/851-866 MHz, and 896-901/935-940 MHz bands to operate while their applications are pending.
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"It’s good that they got it out,” EWA President Mark Crosby said in an interview. “It’s the right thing to do because of the licensing backlog.” The bands covered “are important bands” for private land mobile radio (PLMR) licensees, he said.
Under FCC rules, applicants proposing a new PLMR station, or asking to modify an existing station below 470 MHz, must offer a showing of frequency coordination, but while the application is pending are then permitted to operate the proposed station for a period of up to 180 days, starting 10 days after the application is submitted to the FCC. But they must often wait many months for FCC approval in the frequencies above 470 MHz, the FCC acknowledged in the order (http://fcc.us/19QnttM).
The licensees already had gotten a waiver through Dec. 31 (http://bit.ly/1h26k4s), sought by EWA last summer, allowing operations pending an FCC decision provided they meet other commission requirements. EWA noted in its original request that the commission’s Jan. 1, 2013, PLMR narrowbanding deadline “triggered the filing of a large number of Part 90 applications in late 2012 and into 2013, resulting in notably longer processing times for non-Public Safety Pool applications."
On Dec. 24, EWA asked that the waiver be extended. EWA “notes that processing times have improved somewhat since it filed its initial waiver request, but still do not approach [the Wireless Bureau’s] prior speed-of-service,” the bureau said. “Based on the record before us, we grant EWA’s request to extend the temporary waiver under the same terms as the initial waiver. ... The waiver applies only to such applications that meet all of the requirements of Section 90.159(b) other than the below-470 MHz limitation.” The waiver also does not apply to public safety licensees, the bureau said.
Crosby said public safety applicants face much shorter backlogs and didn’t need relief, though action on PLMR applications currently takes about four months. The Oct. 1-16 partial federal shutdown was “the last thing the commission needed,” Crosby said. “That was bad. We couldn’t submit applications. They backed up."
The day the government reopened, EWA submitted 485 applications, Crosby told us. “We made a mistake and tried to file them all at once and we found out that the Universal Licensing [System] could only take 400 at a time,” he said. “We jammed the system. To try to provide quality of service, we wanted to tell everybody your app’s now on file, but we had too many. We got it done. It just took us two days instead of one day.”