Article by Peggy Hollinger and Yasemin Craggs: “In early August, when corporate activity was in a summer lull, Elon Musk’s SpaceX quietly opened up a new front in a global battle over a scarce and precious resource: radio spectrum.
Its target was an obscure international regulation governing the way spectrum, the invisible highway of electromagnetic waves that enables all wireless technology, is shared by satellite operators in different orbits. And the chosen weapon was the US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission.
On August 9, SpaceX petitioned the FCC to loosen globally agreed power limits on transmissions from operators like itself in low Earth orbit, the region of space up to 2,000km above the planet’s surface set to be a pivotal arena in the future of communication, transportation and defence.
The so-called equivalent power flux density rules were set more than 20 years ago to ensure signals from low Earth orbit did not interfere with those from systems in higher geostationary, or fixed, orbit.
SpaceX, which owns the world’s fastest-growing satellite broadband network, Starlink, told the regulator that these “antiquated power restrictions” were unfit for “the modern space age”. It went on to charge that the international process governing the rules had been hijacked by an alliance between the operators of older, geostationary systems and “America’s staunchest adversaries”.
At stake was “US global competitiveness in the new space economy” and the future of satellite communication, it said.
SpaceX’s broadside was the second attempt in less than a year to win a revision of these highly technical rules. Nine months ago at the World Radiocommunication Conference, where regulations governing spectrum use are decided, SpaceX and Project Kuiper — Amazon’s attempt to build a rival to Musk’s system — lost an initial attempt to win global support for a change to the power restrictions.
Although many in the industry believe a revision is long overdue, the discussions were tense and divisive, according to participants.
On one side were the upstart tech companies whose low Earth orbit satellite networks are threatening the business models of longer-established competitors with high-speed, low-latency broadband services…(More)”.