Most of the Federal Communications Commission’s online systems are back in service now, and the commission has issued further guidance regarding extensions of filing deadlines.
The FCC says its Universal Licensing System (ULS), Tower Construction Notification System (TCNS), E-106 System and Antenna Structure Registration System (ASR) are available again, with an exception noted at the end of this story. Technical issues had taken them down for more than 11 days, from the evening of Friday June 9 until about 9 a.m. Eastern time today.
The bureaus involved are extending the deadlines for all regulatory filings that were due in those systems between June 9 and June 29. The extention runs until Friday, June 30.
“We note that we have provided for a longer extension for these filings than initially contemplated in the June 13 Public Notice in anticipation of high traffic volumes on these systems in the coming days,” the commission said in its update.
“In that regard, we encourage filers to consider deferring discretionary filings this week, and we encourage filers preparing large submissions to coordinate in advance with staff of the bureaus.”
Some important further points:
The notice does not extend deadlines for any comment or filing dates outside of the period of June 9 to June 29.
For review periods based on filings made in the TCNS and E-106 systems that were in progress during the downtime, the review periods were paused, or tolled, while the systems were unavailable; those review periods resume today, June 21.
For filings where reply or responsive pleadings are allowed, the actual filing date will trigger the timeframes for those replies or responses.
The FCC said it cannot waive statutory filing deadlines, such as those associated with petitions for reconsideration. “However, for the purpose of any statutory deadlines applicable to filings required to be made in the affected systems, we consider the commission to be open for the filing of documents with statutory deadlines beginning on Friday, June 30, 2023, and filings due between June 9, 2023, and June 29, 2023 will be deemed timely filed if filed by June 30, 2023.”
Any Special Temporary Authorities that expire from June 9 through June 29 will now expire on June 30. STA applicants should resume normal STA filing procedures, including electronic filing in ULS for most STA applications and filing in the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) for market-based STAs only. Emergency STA requests that cannot be immediately filed electronically can still be initially filed by telephone or email.
The commission also said applicants and licensees with questions about all this can contact FCC Licensing Support via the web or phone.
Exception as noted earlier: One feature that remains unavailable as of today is the query download feature in ULS and ASR, which is used to save the results of a search in a pipe-delimited text (*.txt) file. “While the public may request a query download and will receive an email confirmation that their request has been received, they will not receive a second email containing a link to the query download results,” the notice states. “The commission will update the ULS and ASR websites when the query download feature is available.”
