Congress Put Satellite Communications in Private Hands, and Kennedy Signed It Into Law
Europe’s post offices ran their satellite links. Washington chartered an investor-owned company
This article summarizes several of the key points in Lesson 10. Public Safety, the Military and Global Satellite Services, which is part of Broadband Breakfast's online course, "150 Years of American Telecommunications." A new lesson will be released every Monday.
On Aug. 31, 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed a law putting America’s role in a global satellite communications system in private hands.
The Communications Satellite Act authorized the creation of Comsat, an investor-owned company charged with developing and operating the American portion of the system. Washington would help oversee the enterprise, but telephone companies and public shareholders would own it.
The technology had already crossed the Atlantic. In July, AT&T, the company that dominated American telephone service, used its experimental Telstar 1 satellite to relay live television between the United States and Europe. Congress now had to decide who would control the commercial system that followed.
In Europe, the mail carrier ran the satellite dish. In Britain, the General Post Office delivered letters and ran the phones, and it built a ground station in the southwestern county of Cornwall that caught Telstar’s signals. In West Germany, the state postal agency, the Deutsche Bundespost, played the same part.
In Japan, a 1953 law moved overseas calling into a separate company, Kokusai Denshin Denwa, or KDD, while a government-owned corporation kept running phones at home.
The American arrangement was contentious. Taxpayers had paid for the rockets and much of the space research that made satellites possible, and opponents called the bill a giveaway to AT&T. Ten Democratic senators mounted a filibuster against the legislation.
On Aug. 14, about two weeks before Kennedy signed the bill, the Senate voted to shut down the filibuster. It was the first time since 1927 that senators had mustered the votes to force an end to debate, a vote known as cloture.
Comsat’s ownership tried to satisfy rival camps. AT&T and other phone companies aspired to own the system, while the bill’s opponents wanted the government to own it. Communications carriers, including AT&T, initially held half its stock, while public investors held the other half. The president appointed three of its 15 directors.
“The general public, the communications industry, and the Federal Government all will have a voice,” Kennedy said when he signed the law.
That compromise limited the established carriers’ control while giving Comsat a privileged position as the American representative in the international system. Critics saw a contradiction in using a new monopoly to keep existing ones in check.
The network took shape quickly. Eleven countries formed the international satellite consortium Intelsat in 1964, with Comsat as its manager. Its first commercial satellite, Early Bird, began carrying traffic across the Atlantic on June 28, 1965.
Three digits, no master plan
Satellites got a federal charter and a single national company. A few years later, a far humbler piece of telephone history got neither: the number Americans dial in an emergency. Its story unfolded town by town.
Before 911, someone reporting a house fire, a break-in or a heart attack often had to look up a separate seven-digit number for the police, the fire department or an ambulance, or dial zero and hope the operator could connect them. In 1967, a presidential commission on crime urged a single nationwide number for emergencies. AT&T answered on Jan. 12, 1968, announcing 911.
The first call came a month later, and it did not run on AT&T’s network. On Feb. 16, Alabama House Speaker Rankin Fite dialed 911 from city hall in Haleyville, a town of about 4,000 people in northwest Alabama. The line belonged to Alabama Telephone Co., a small independent carrier outside AT&T’s Bell System, which had beaten the giant to the switch.
Unlike Comsat, 911 began without a federal charter or a nationwide funding commitment. Local governments and telephone companies introduced the service community by community. Telephone bill surcharges became an important source of funding, but adoption took decades. By 1987, only about half the U.S. population had access.
Congress took a different approach to communications for emergency personnel in 2012. It created the First Responder Network Authority, known as FirstNet, to oversee a nationwide public safety broadband network. Lawmakers provided dedicated airwaves and $7 billion in funding, giving the project a national framework that 911 had lacked at its inception.
Modernizing emergency call centers is the next test. Next Generation 911 replaces older telephone-based systems with internet-based networks capable of handling texts, photos and video alongside voice calls. Federal support has included more than $109 million in grants announced in 2019.
Lesson 10 also examines the military’s first satellite constellation and the Federal Communications Commission’s 1972 Open Skies policy, which opened domestic satellite communications to additional competitors. Lesson 9 explains how satellites transformed cable television’s programming business. Lesson 33 returns to networks in low Earth orbit.
