Ending Cable Signal Leakage Rules for Fiber Builds

Are there ways to reduce burdens on small cable providers without undermining the Federal Communications Commission’s overall mission and requirements? These providers say: look into eliminating or modifying the cable signal leakage rules for those companies that have deployed fiber in a service area.

While it is easy to conclude that our rules are obsolete as they pertain to fiber networks, the harder step is actually fixing the situation. When these rules were adopted, a traditional cable system used coaxial cable to transmit radio frequency (RF) signals carrying content to residential and business consumers. If operated properly, such systems do not cause any interference to spectrum users, such as aeronautical and navigation users. However, RF can “leak” from a cable coaxial system for various reasons, including loose connections, damaged plant or cracked cables. As a way to prevent this from occurring, system operators are required under the Commission’s rules to conduct regular monitoring for signal leakage, maintain logs showing the date and location of any leak, and test annually to demonstrate that a systems cumulative signal leakage is below acceptable interference levels. I learned during my meeting with the small cable providers a while back that, to comply with the annual testing requirement, they rent a small plane and circle their territory with appropriate RF sensors to determine if there any leakage. In the grand scheme of things, this is not a huge expense ($5,000) but when you operate 15 small systems, it costs upwards of $100,000 adding in time and labor. And that’s money that can be used to curtail rate increases or expand the network’s reach to unserved homes.