Section 17.47 of the FCC’s tower lighting and marking rules has two straight-forward requirements. One of those two provides that tower owners must inspect their tower(s) once every three months.
That’s a lot of work, especially if you own a whole bunch of towers. Because of that, back in 2007, two big-time tower owners – American Tower and Global Signal – asked for, and got, a break. As we reported back then, the Commission agreed to waive the inspection-every-three-months requirements. The FCC was particularly swayed by the fact that both companies had state-of-the-art remote tower monitoring systems: American Tower was using the Eagle Monitoring System, Global Signal the HARK Tower System. As a result, the FCC agreed to waive the quarterly inspection requirement to a once-a-year event for tower owners using the Eagle, HARK or similar systems. (The Commission eventually adopted an expedited process for waiver requests based on the use of such systems.)
Reducing the inspection chore by 75% provided considerable relief. But over the six-plus years since its waiver was first granted, American Tower still rang up nearly $10 million in costs conducting some 39,000 annual inspections. So now it has come back to the FCC for a further waiver: it wants to be relieved of any inspection requirement; the computer-based monitoring system can handle everything that needs to be handled.
Obviously, the cost of complying with the inspection requirement is a boatload more for American Tower, which owns a gazillion towers, than for most folks. And the cost of installing and maintaining an adequate monitoring system is not inconsiderable. But all tower owners should give some thought to whether the requested waiver might make sense for them. If it would, then it might be a good idea to throw in some comments in support of American Tower’s request.
Comments on the American Tower proposal are due by Valentine’s Day; reply comments are due by February 21.
