Spectrum

Almost 57 years after President Richard Nixon’s long-distance telephone call to the Apollo 11 astronauts—via radio—Artemis II marked mankind’s return to the lunar neighborhood.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced that the Commission would vote on an order to modernize its satellite spectrum-sharing rules—a change that could unlock more than $2 billion in economic benefits for the American people and up to seven-fold more capacity for space-based broadband services. Drawing from the state-of-the-art in satellite technology, the FCC’s new technical rules would revise the decades-old framework for how Geostationary Orbit and Non-Geostationary Orbit systems share spectrum.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Department of Commerce announced the debut of its Space Launch Frequency Coordination Portal, which will streamline federal reviews of spectrum requests by commercial space launch providers. The Space Launch Frequency Coordination Portal replaces a system that was previously run through e-mail and had been criticized by industry for lacking transparency and moving slowly.

Seven years after launching its first Starlink internet satellite, SpaceX is preparing to go public and could command a sky-high valuation. One ironic beneficiary of Starlink’s success is telecom mogul Charlie Ergen, who has used regulatory arbitrage to save his failed broadband bet. This is a tale of dumb industrial policy that might end well despite government planners. The story starts in 2019 when the Trump Justice Department required T-Mobile and Sprint to sell spectrum and their prepaid phone business to Ergen’s Dish network as a condition for green-lighting their merger.

SpaceX emerged as a possible bidder to acquire more AWS-3 spectrum in the Federal Communications Commission's upcoming auction, sparking further questions about its intent for Starlink Mobile direct-to-device services. First reported by Ookla analyst Mike Dano on LinkedIn, the FCC a

Starlink may have started out as a gap-filler in rural areas, but its reach, pricing, and capacity seem to indicate that it intends to be a much bigger player on the broadband stage, according to cable industry executives. Starlink is reaching more deeply into suburban and urban areas where it has spare capacity, it's ramping up at retail, and it's preparing to deploy bigger low-Earth orbit satellites packed with

The Federal Communications Commission voted to start a proceeding to bring greater spectrum abundance to cutting-edge, emergent ventures in space, namely supporting telemetry, tracking, and command (TT&C) for on-the-horizon endeavors like orbital laboratories, satellite repairs, and private inhabitable spacecraft.  The new “Weird Space Stuff” proceeding looks to address shortages of available, reliable spectrum for such operations.

The Federal Communications Commission's coming auction of the upper C-band for 5G and 6G and possible direct-to-device use cases will require incumbents to vacate that spectrum and pursue alternatives such as terrestrial fiber and Ku-band satellites.

China seeks to lead the development of future generations of spectrum management technology. The use of wireless technologies has exploded in recent decades, and technological development is expanding the possibilities for use of the electromagnetic spectrum. As competition between the United States and China intensifies, interest has sharpened in finding better ways to manage the use of spectrum to support critical applications in areas such as warfighting, mobile communications, and remote sensing.

In conversation with Technology Policy Institute's Scott Wallsten, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Arielle Roth admitted that the spectrum implementation puzzle is harder than the legislation suggested. Assistant Secretary Roth said that as a Senate staffer drafting the spectrum provisions, she had “more of an impatient approach to spectrum identification.” On the implementation side, she’s discovered that some federal systems slated for relocation don’t yet have specifications for their replacement equipment, that agencies face competing cost and timeline