Veteran engineer Sherrod Munday shares interesting data about the C Band registration process.
“Of the 7,145 new C Band satellite downlink sites registered since the April 19, 2018 freeze, 2,858 of those registrations since Sept. 13 (in week 37) were from one organization, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints locations,” he tells us. “The remaining ~300 new registrations per week is still quite high as the October 17, 2018 deadline for filing nears.”
Munday is vice president of engineering for the Sky Angel television network. The image below shows the trend line by week.
Munday downloaded the raw data from the FCC’s IBFS department and broke the data down into relevant time windows to map and chart it. The full IBFS data set contains the business names and other data for each site and revealed that the LDS had bulk-registered many sites in a short period of time.
[Read: Deadline For Registering C-Band Downlink Fast Approaching]
“Note that the number of ‘sites’ registered is far larger than the number of registrations filed because the FCC allows multiple sites to be registered on a single form,” he continued. “In the case of the LDS church, they registered ~50 sites per registration form. That’s still a lot of registrations. … My desire is to get the map out there so the 5G guys, broadcasters, and other industry-related folks can see the scope of the situation.”
Among the many familiar names that show up with numerous entries in the registrant list are Nexstar Broadcasting, Buford Satellite, Comcast Cable, Fox Broadcasting, Gray Television, iHeartMedia, Cumulus, Bible Broadcasting Network, Moody Bible Institute and New Hampshire Public Radio.
(He adds that another source counts 7,111 new sites, a difference he attributes to 34 sites that registered with the incorrect frequency range.)
This second image shows the proliferation of registrations by period of time.
The FCC wants unregistered users of C Band earth stations to register by Oct. 17, to receive future consideration and possible protection from interference. Numerous broadcast and technical organizations have urged users, including broadcast stations and ownership groups, to register.
Radio and TV broadcasters, as well as cable providers, use C Band satellite systems for reliable distribution of programming content. Some estimates place the number of C Band downlink sites in the United States at more than 27,000, and demand for new facilities shows no signs of letting up. But the FCC’s consideration of sharing that spectrum for broadband companies puts existing users at risk. Munday notes that SES, Intelsat, Telesat and Eutelsat formed an alliance to work with earth station operations to clear out spectrum for 5G
