Carriers Urge FCC to Keep Satellites Off Key 5G Bands Ahead of Oct. 29 Vote
AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are pressing federal regulators to scale back a plan that would open 482 megahertz of airwaves to satellite-to-phone service, as SpaceX builds toward its own wireless carrier.
The Federal Communications Commission will consider the proposal at its Oct. 29 open meeting. It would expand what the agency calls Supplemental Coverage from Space, eliminate “burdensome” requirements and align those rules with mobile satellite service rules.
A yes vote would issue a notice of proposed rulemaking and open the plan to public comment. It would not adopt final rules.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has pitched it as a way to eliminate cellphone dead zones, Moneywise reported. The carriers’ trade group, CTIA, warned in a filing that “the Commission’s buildout decisions have real consequences for consumers.”
CTIA and the three carriers met Oct. 20 with the offices of Carr and Commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty, according to the group’s letter. Their main request was to remove the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands from the draft.
Those bands carry much of the carriers’ 5G traffic and use time-division duplexing, in which phones and towers take turns sending and receiving. CTIA argues satellite service there would cause interference for more than 300 million users.
T-Mobile, which calls the 2.5 GHz band “the core foundation of its Ultra Capacity 5G network,” made the case in its own filing.
“Every tower can and does keep the same rhythm — they switch between synchronized talking and listening so that signals never collide. A satellite, however, cannot keep that same rhythm,” the company said.
The carriers also want to keep control of their spectrum. Satellite companies now must lease airwaves from a carrier, and the draft would replace that with coexistence agreements. CTIA wants carriers to retain “meaningful consent.”
The letter does not name SpaceX, and CTIA said it supports satellite service as a way to extend coverage to hard-to-reach and disaster-hit areas.
SpaceX Builds Toward a Fourth Carrier
SpaceX has had a busy month at the FCC. The agency cleared it on Oct. 6 to deploy up to 15,000 next-generation satellites built to connect directly to phones.
Two days later, SpaceX agreed to buy up to 14 megahertz of paired 800 MHz spectrum nationwide from Grain Management in a deal the Wall Street Journal valued at about $8 billion, Moneywise reported. T-Mobile sold those licenses to Grain in August.
SpaceX has targeted early 2028 for Starlink Mobile service on its own airwaves. Elon Musk told analysts he sees “a clear path to several hundred billion dollars a year” in connectivity revenue.
That would be a leap from a business that brought in about $5.2 billion in the third quarter.
Investors are taking the threat seriously. On Oct. 23, AT&T and T-Mobile each sank nearly 8% and Verizon slipped about 1.2% after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is in talks to access at least 80,000 U.S. cell sites.
Carrier executives have played down the risk. “It’s not something that gets done overnight,” AT&T CEO John Stankey told analysts Oct. 21, adding that a competitive network takes “a lot of years and a huge level of investment.”
Verizon reports third-quarter results Monday, Oct. 26, and T-Mobile reports Oct. 28, the day before the FCC vote.
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