WASHINGTON-Congress late last week was expected to introduce legislation to force the Federal Communications Commission to lift the two-month-old paging application freeze, a source told RCR.
The legislation likely will take the form of an amendment by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) to an unrelated bill. Pressler last month urged FCC Chairman Reed Hundt to resume processing paging applications.
“I am particularly concerned about the impact on local and regional carriers, many of which are small businesses, who compete on a daily basis with nationwide competitors who are exempted from the freeze,” said Pressler in a March 15 letter. Other lawmakers have raised similar concerns.
Hundt replied that “lifting the paging freeze at this time could seriously jeopardize our ability to conduct auctions for geographic area paging licenses and would open up the available paging frequencies to rampant speculation.”
The FCC chief said the Federal Trade Commission supports the paging freeze. To underscore fears about speculation by application mills, Hundt said 1,700 common paging applications were filed three weeks prior to the freeze. That compares to an average of 700 paging applications per month received by the commission last fiscal year. And a few days before the freeze, added Hundt, 1,400 applications for private carrier paging channels were submitted on one day.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley (R-Va.) and ranking minority member John Dingell (D-Mich.), meanwhile, are preparing to send a strongly worded letter to Hundt opposing the paging application freeze.
The FCC, for its part, is likely to offer limited relief to paging carriers this week but keep the freeze intact.
At a minimum, paging operators might be allowed to expand their systems while the FCC crafts rules to auction geographic-based licenses. However, additional transmitter sites would ostensibly be restricted to secondary status. That means incumbent paging carriers would have to accept interference from paging auction winners, a circumstance that could dissuade the former from investing in new facilities.
Until now, paging operators have needed separate authorizations for every transmitter in their service area. Geographic-based licenses, like those issued in the cellular and personal communications services sectors, enable carriers to construct transmitters throughout a defined service area under one license. Geographic licenses are tailored to auctions, which overall have raised more than $16 billion so far.
The Coalition for a Competitive Paging Industry, a group of local and regional paging operators that petitioned the FCC on Feb. 28 to withdraw the freeze, said a partial lifting of the freeze is inadequate. The FCC imposed the application filing freeze Feb. 8 on all paging companies except those building nationwide systems.
The Personal Communications Industry Association also is lobbying the commission to change course.
The paging coalition has criticized PCIA for not taking a more aggressive stand, saying the trade association is held hostage by large members who hold nationwide paging permits.
“There are no present plans to lift the freeze,” said Rosalind Allen,
deputy chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
Policymakers, according to sources, have been moved most by the impact of the paging application freeze on Glenayre Technologies Inc. The firm, which is headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., and manufactures paging terminals in Quincy, Ill., predicts it will lose $10 million to $12 million in net sales the first quarter due to the paging freeze.
