The FCC voted to speed up cellular licensing.

Applications for licenses to build cellular mobile telephone systems in all areas outside the nation’s 120 largest communities will be accepted all at once starting early next year, the Federal Communications Commission reported. The winners will be selected in lotteries that the FCC hopes to hold before the end of 1986. The exact dates will be set “after the commission secures a location to store the thousands of applications expected to be filed,” the commission said. Hallways at the FCC’s headquarters were lined with boxes of applications during the last application period.