US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioners voted unanimously in favour of conducting a review of decades-old spectrum sharing rules to provide satellite companies with improved coverage, capacity and signal quality.
The proposal starts a formal proceeding for the FCC to update technical rules written for the satellite market in the 1990s.
The regulatory agency is looking to update power restrictions for the use of Ku and Ka bands that are commonly used in satellite communications.
“The power limits developed in the 1990s hamper satellite broadband by degrading signal quality, reducing coverage, limiting capacity, and making it harder to share spectrum with other satellite systems,” FCC chair Brendan Carr said in a statement.
Lifting those restrictions will provide more throughput for broadband satellites from Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper, Tim Farrar, president at TMF Associates, told Mobile World Live.
Carr stated the FCC is also looking at creative ways to unleash wireless spectrum on the 37GHz band for use in fixed wireless access broadband and IoT services.
He noted 37GHz is a shared band between government and commercial entities, but “there are no clear rules of the road for sharing”.
“This lack of clarity prevents companies from moving forward with investments and deployments. This proceeding can fix that by establishing rules for commercial fixed wireless on a shared basis with federal users.”
He stated the new framework could unlock 600MHz of spectrum for new commercial services.
