The problem of assigning customers to satellite channels is considered in this paper. Finding an optimal allocation of customers to satellite channels is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem and is shown to be NP-complete in an earlier study. We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) approach to search for the best/optimal assignment of customers to satellite channels. Various issues related to genetic algorithms such as solution representation, selection methods, genetic operators and repair of invalid solutions are presented. A comparison of GA with CPLEX8.1 is presented to show the advantages of this approach in terms of computation time and solution quality.