Satellite Industry and Sub Cable Group Call for Changes to FY2026 Regulatory Fees

The NPRM proposes a 35.3% increase for submarine cable licenses, despite its brief discussion of them and the “limited use of Commission resources by such licensees,” the coalition said. “The proposals in the FY 2026 NPRM discriminate against submarine cable operators and result in unfair financial burdens that are not commensurate with the above stated limited use of Commission resources.” The NPRM “failed to articulate a reason for increasing the fees by such an amount,” so they should be reduced, the group said. Implementing the proposed fees “risks undermining some of the Commission’s own objectives for improving the predictability of the regulatory environment for investors seeking a license to land a submarine cable in the United States.”

Several satellite commenters -- including Planet Labs, the Commercial Space Federation and the Commercial Smallsat Spectrum Management Association -- said the FCC should create a new fee category for ground station operators that offer telemetry, tracking and command or Earth exploration satellite service imagery downlink services to foreign-licensed spacecraft that don’t provide commercial service in the U.S. The current “legacy regulatory and fee structure for foreign spacecraft that do not seek to provide FCC-regulated services to the U.S. market is inconsistent with the modern approach to ground station infrastructure,” said Planet Labs. CSSMA said a new fee category based on a single flat regulatory fee per earth station “would align with the Commission’s goal to modernize its space licensing rules.”

SES Americom and NAB both said the FCC should broaden the payor base for regulatory fees. SES Americom called for the FCC to create new fee categories for experimental licenses, unlicensed use and automated frequency coordination systems because they all benefit from the work of the agency's Office of Engineering and Technology.

NAB argued that efforts to advocate for new payors are hampered by a lack of information. Only the FCC can access its internal data on how many full-time equivalents work on matters that affect entities that don’t currently pay regulatory fees, such as “Big Tech” companies, it said. “NAB submits that it is undeniable that such additional entities should share in the costs of funding the Commission’s activities.” The trade group said it's “willing to meet with Commission staff and stakeholders in the regulatory fee process to close this information gap and find an administrable means of accounting for new categories of fee payor.”

Kepler said the FCC should “holistically assess” the regulatory fee system to make space industry fees more predictable and pause increases until it adopts an updated licensing framework. Once that happens, “the Regulatory Fees should be determined based on a fixed, indexed, amount rather than on fluctuating human resources, as is currently the case.”

NAB also called for lowering the fees for earth stations. The FCC “shift those costs toward non-[geostationary satellite orbit] space stations, on which the Space Bureau expends most of its resources,” the group said. “This proposed shift in costs would more fairly distribute fees among space station and earth station licensees in accordance with the Space Bureau’s priorities and activities.”

CTIA said the FCC’s proposal on changing the unit measure for allocating commercial mobile radio service needs more consideration. The agency “has used the same unit measure to allocate CMRS regulatory fees for over 20 years, and assessing whether a different data source would better serve the statutory requirements raises a variety of complex legal and practical questions.” The FCC shouldn’t adopt any changes to CMRS fees until FY 2027 at the earliest, the group added.