 Welcome to New America. I am Michael Calabrese. I direct the Wireless Future Project here. And our Wireless Future event today focuses on Leo satellite constellations and why smart spectrum sharing rules matter in space. Leo's for the undoctrinated, and I think that's probably most of us still, but hopefully not for long. Leo's are low earth orbit satellites and represent a breakthrough in satellite broadband technology. You often hear them referred to as NGSOs, non-geosynchronous satellite orbits. So basically they orbit and the geosynchronous satellites do not. Although broadband service from satellites is not new, large constellations in low earth orbit with the ability to provide high speed and low latency broadband to rural and remote areas globally is a new and groundbreaking innovation. The FCC has been particularly active this year in updating the framework for NGSO satellite constellations to share spectrum and to share space with lots of other things up there, including many other types of satellites. Last December, the Commission voted unanimously to adopt a notice of proposed rulemaking on satellite broadband which proposes rules for NGSO spectrum sharing and interference protections, also for information sharing to inform good faith coordination, as well as processing ground priorities, sun setting of protections, and more. Separately, in September, the FCC adopted new stricter rules to govern the deorbiting of satellites and to minimize space debris. Our public interest coalition has been particularly interested in promoting robust satellite spectrum rules that facilitate more coverage to bridge digital divides, more competition, and more innovation in services, which I'm sure you'll hear a bit about later. But this is particularly important from our perspective for rural, tribal, and underserved areas here in the U.S. and globally. We believe that this is particularly important because all satellite spectrum is shared, making the rules for sharing critical to consumers and to efficient spectrum use. So our run of show today will be first to hear from our two FCC commissioners, Jeffrey Starks and Nathan Simington, who have really gotten engaged on these issues. Then we'll have a discussion panel, which includes the two actually to be let off by Professor Whitney Omeyer, who's going to give us a bit more background from some spectrum X research that she's done. And the discussion panel includes the two U.S. companies with the largest planned Leo constellations as well as another public interest advocate. The commissioners are on a very tight schedule, so we'll go first to Commissioner Starks for his opening remarks. Commissioner Starks was confirmed by the Senate in 2018 after most recently having helped to lead the FCC's enforcement bureau. So Commissioner, there he is. All right. Thank you. I think we're all getting used to being back at events, but having a magic door from whence I appear is a little bit of a new thing. Well, of course, glad to be back here in person. I've already seen so many friends and folks that have obviously been in dialogue with for a number of points here, but seeing folks in person live is special. And I have one of my former interns here in the room, which I'm always excited to see that next generation, and that's part of what we do. I know that's part of the mission of OTI as well. And so thank you all for being here. Thank you for hosting. And I was just visiting with my colleague, Commissioner Simington, who's also here. You're getting a two for lucky all of you. For those of you, of course, who have been paying attention, listening to me for the last number of years, you'll know that I'm thrilled to be in what I think is a golden era of commercial space. I've been awed by the progress that we've seen from NASA, its commercial partnerships, which have unlocked private sector achievement at an absolutely frenetic pace. Reusable launch vehicles are not just here. They're ready for serious lift capacity. Commercial human spaceflight isn't just around the corner. Several companies are doing it, of course, today. Much more than just even tourism. This past month, we saw the fifth commercial crewed flight shuttle astronauts up to the ISS. Days later, the fourth flight splashed down safely after 170 days in orbit. The satellite industry itself as well has, of course, made enormous progress. Those things are related. Satellites have become smaller, lighter, more cost effective to build and build quickly, thanks to innovation in modularity, component design, the manufacturing process. At the same time, we've, of course, seen growth in launch opportunities at a dramatically lower cost per launch with an expansive menu of rideshare, tugs, dedicated flights that work for large and small payloads alike. We're also continuing to see progress on the ground segment towards terminals that are smaller, more efficient, hopefully cheaper, and in some cases even interoperable. Collectively, these trends are opening new possibilities for everything from niche missions to large constellations. They're pulling down entry barriers left and right, giving way to a vibrant ecosystem of services that rely on space-based connectivity. As a commissioner, focus so deeply, of course, on the digital divide. I'm especially thrilled about what this golden era of commercial space could mean for broadband. New satellite broadband systems promise more choice, better performance for many Americans, including those who live, work, and travel in some of the toughest to serve places they can even improve the reach of terrestrial broadband networks through satellite backhaul and perhaps one day soon, base stations flying in low earth orbit. Importantly, these systems are also improving the resilience, agility of our broadband infrastructure. They're empowering our first responders, survivors, and governments to ad hoc more powerful, more secure networks more quickly, sometimes just a mere matter of moments after a disaster strikes. This is more important than ever considering the world that we know we're living in. All of this progress is extremely exciting to witness. Now I'm optimistic that our success in space will only continue to build even if we see some turbulence along the way, but for that to truly happen, we can't take dynamic space economy for granted. We need to do our part to keep the momentum going, enable sustained innovation of the kind that we've seen today. And so that's what I'm going to share with you a couple of thoughts on here today. Making space innovation sustainable is a multi-dimensional issue. It begins with focusing on competition as a pillar of our strategy in space and so that includes our strategy on spectrum access. It's almost hard to believe, but nearly six years have passed since our first KAKU processing round for NGSO systems. So let's take stock briefly of what's happened since. The FCC moved quickly within just a few weeks after the application window closed. We proposed new rules to accommodate many of the NGSO new entrants as possible. Spectrum sharing, of course, was a key focus even of that proceeding. In 2017, we moved to new rules, including a default spectrum splitting procedure that would facilitate sharing among systems licensed in the same processing round. The basic concept behind that procedure, segmenting the band during in-line events to encourage private coordination, was not unfamiliar. In fact, it dated back to previous commission decisions circa 2002. The default rule showed progress, but it hardly settled the matter. Private coordination amongst NGSO systems remains a work in progress, but at the same time, more NGSO systems applied for the same spectrum, prompting another processing round, not just in KAKU now, but in the V-band as well, where we're also on round two. The music didn't stop there. We've continued to see even more applications, plus announcements of planned systems that one day may take their own run at KAKU or the V-band too. Of course, I'd like to be cautious when it comes to making predictions about outer space. I think anybody would be wise to do so. But when you look at our history, much becomes clear. The days of holding a processing round and expecting the outcome to survive decades with just some minor tweaks, mostly to account for systems that drop out, well, those days are most likely over. There's too much interest from new operators who want in. Existing operators are evolving to new technology generations even more rapidly, and so don't get me wrong, this is a good place to be. But it also raises thorny and difficult questions about spectrum rights. Putting aside the question of how systems authorized in one processing round should protect each other. What level of protections do they owe to other systems that came first? How do you define that protection level and measure compliance with it? How long should that protection last in the long run? What balance will advance the public interest the most and result in the most robust, innovative and competitive set of satellite services across all operators? And at what level of specificity should government need to decide these issues if the goal is to encourage private agreement? Many of you know these are questions that are actively being worked on. The NPRM is exploring these questions. Our work on it continues. But here's a little bit of additional guidance from me on how I think we can sustain a competitive environment. First, if we want to attract the investment required to launch, maintain and upgrade a satellite network, then the satellite spectrum we assign must remain investment grade. So while satellite spectrum rights can and should be shared, they also need to remain sufficiently stable and secure for companies to build out their systems. Second, we must aspire to more than just a few NGSO broadband systems in orbit. Satellite consumers deserve choice. And choice is the only way to drive sustained innovation. Choice becomes especially critical for users that depend uniquely on these constellations again, those for whom other systems, terrestrial or geo, just simply can't substitute. These are mobility users, government users, users in chronically underserved areas that could be part of that story. And we should keep our eye on them as we move forward. Finally, we must keep looking for ways to promote spectral efficiency in satellite. This is something that for those who pay attention, notice that I emphasize when we adopted the NPRM. Systems that don't use spectrum efficiently burden the operations of those systems that do. They also complicate, or even foreclose, new entry and make the problem of encouraging new competitors while also preserving spectrum access for existing ones much more difficult to solve. But spectral efficiency isn't just about ensuring that systems are good sharers. It's also about evaluating interference accurately and defining it responsibly when figuring out how to share. Coordinating around actual interference, not paper interference, leads to more users being served with better service in the same amount of spectrum. The closer we can come to modeling actual results, the better off we'll all be. I cannot emphasize that I urge industry to explore the full realm of what is possible here. Because when you begin to unpack real world impacts, the effect of spectral efficiency on competition and innovation becomes crystal clear. When a system must coordinate around another system that isn't built to tolerate interference, or around protection criteria that overestimates when service impacts occur, the result could be less service, slower service, or in fact no service in some of those key areas. Even at a density of just 100 people per square mile, it doesn't take much for over-conservative assumptions to affect the services to millions, millions of Americans. These constraints undermine the business case as well for satellite broadband and could discourage some competitors from building it all. They'll view the band as too saturated, need to move on, and that is bad overall for competition. Other competitors may find ways to compensate for inefficiency, but their efforts will come, of course, at a cost. They may decide to launch more satellites, for example, which adds time, money, and potential risk. That could lead to millions of Americans waiting longer for, again, that competitive service, and delayed entry is a competition issue. It could raise consumer costs, which is a quintessential competition issue, and it could even lead to more debris risk, which is an exceedingly compelling issue. It's about sustaining as much innovation as we can possibly using a scarce spectrum resource. I'll leave you with one last thought about efficiency from dynamic databases to tiered access models to random access protocols. We've consistently leveraged innovation to help us cram as much usage into shared terrestrial bands as possible. We should be equally forward thinking when it comes to satellite. The scenarios are no doubt different. The solutions will be too, but space is getting crowded. We can't shy away from new ways of doing things, even if it takes some work for us to get there. I know that the satellite industry, which has been doing sharing spectrum for years now, will be up to the task when the time comes. Let me close by observing that spectrum isn't the only scarce resource that we need to allocate wisely. If we want to sustain space innovation over the long haul, we need to be judicious in how we use our orbits. Now, I don't need to remind this group, again, that orbital debris is a problem. But what I would emphasize is this. We cannot maintain a low barrier environment in space unless we manage debris risk successfully and the impacts of unmanaged debris risk on the space economy could be felt much sooner than we otherwise think. Just for a moment, let's put aside what we can all agree are worst case scenarios like a chain reaction of collisions making Leo virtually unusable. Well before we approach anything like that, I'm concerned that debris proliferation will make it tougher and much more expensive to fly a mission to space. The financial risk posed by debris will become more material that could affect again the availability and price of investment at the same time conjunctions will grow even more frequent, including actionable ones that require costly maneuvers and that in turn will require operators to devote more human, financial, technological and operational resources into risk management, raising the cost profile of planned missions. In combination, these impacts could resurrect some of the entry barriers that we've seen knocked down over the past 10 years, resulting in less competition, less innovation, less dynamic of a space industry. And remember each collision or debris generating event releases thousands of objects and countless more lethal but non-trackable ones. It may not take very many of these to upend the status quo. I've made many of these points last September when we adopted a new rule requiring post-mission disposal in Leo in less than five years. I'm glad we took that step and I look forward to the next phase of debris mitigation efforts. We've got to stay ahead of this problem. Thank you all for having me here today. You have a great day planned and very much looking forward to hearing the readout from so many of you. Please keep open. The dialogue, as many of you know, I'm an open door commissioner. And so please come see me on what affects you and your constituencies most. So thanks again for your time today. Everyone be safe and be well. And back through the magic door. Thank you, Commissioner Starks. And we will strive to get back to those challenging questions that he outlined during our discussion. But first, and next is Commissioner Nathan Simington, who was confirmed in 2020 after serving most recently as a senior advisor at NTIA in the Department of Commerce. Thank you, Michael, for that kind introduction. It's my pleasure to speak today about smart space rules. This could not be a more timely discussion considering how rapidly the commercial satellite sector is expanding. Particularly as we see much larger NGSO constellations coming online. Indeed, the number of active satellites has quintupled in the past 10 years. We now add more satellites per year than existed just 10 years ago. In December of 2021, the FCC adopted a notice of proposed rulemaking that will let the FCC modify its satellite spectrum sharing rules to better address the realities of the blossoming NGSO market and to eliminate rules that may foster conflict among licensees. The item shows that the FCC refuses to hold back U.S. competition in the intrinsically global satellite marketplace. It ensures that outdated policies do not make the United States a second-class jurisdiction for incorporation or operations. The FCC's proposal would provide targeted protection for licensees in earlier processing grounds and give providers confidence to deploy new systems that can cost billions of dollars to build. Regulatory certainty is desperately needed by all broadband providers, whether fiber, mobile, or satellite, to make investments of such magnitude. Regulators must never forget that projects can die on the vine, failing to clear financial hurdles if needless regulatory uncertainty makes them artificially risky. But while protecting licensees in earlier processing grounds, the FCC's proposal would also ensure, through adoption of its 10-year sunset provision, that licensees in later processing grounds have appropriate investment incentives in place. These sunset provisions, along with the adoption of smart service rules to encourage more efficient sharing of satellite spectrum, will pave the way for a much smoother and safer rollout of the large constellations that are swiftly coming online. The more spectrally efficient NGSO systems are, the better they are able to coexist. Modern efficient systems can use a variety of spectrum-optimizing strategies for operation. Like application of an aggregate degraded throughput methodology, or simply by deploying satellites with steerable beams, the record in the proceeding includes key information about available technologies for the FCC to consider as it adopts new rules and studies what to do next. And just last month, the FCC adopted a rule requiring none geostationary satellite operators to deorbit satellites within five years after the completion of their missions. With today's blistering launch pace, the FCC had to rethink assumptions about operational cadences and lifetimes that just seemed self-evident before. So now we require that every licensee, not just domestic licensees, but also foreign licensees, granted operators access to the United States market promptly and responsibly dispose of satellites that have served their purpose. By getting out in front of the longevity issue, we hope that we'll protect the long-term interests of the most advanced responsible operators by reducing random debris and maintaining confidence among the space sector's insurers and financiers. This order marks what I hope is the dawn of a new regulatory approach to the space economy, rules that are tough, sensible, and performance-based, rules that I hope will form the bedrock of a safe, sustainable, and innovative space economy. The issues raised by large constellations are more urgent in the commercial sector, as many of you folks know, because you're designing and building them, and that's what you're here to talk about today. The FCC has unique authority as the only agency in the world with jurisdiction over such a broad range of commercial space activities, and that makes our work to update the FCC's orbital debris and satellite spectrum sharing policies absolutely crucial. The United States represents roughly 50% of the international space economy, and can therefore create a unitary set of clear and flexible rules for safe commercial space operation. The FCC can create incentives for other countries to adopt its rules and potentially thereby internationally harmonize them by applying them to providers seeking access to the U.S. markets. I hope it doesn't sound too silly to call this friendly unilateralism. This is an opportunity to use American market power to advance and vindicate the national, public, and commercial interests of all users of space worldwide. The United States has the most innovative and largest space economy in the world. It has already made mechanism in the FCC to promulgate rules for the entire international commercial space market. And, of course, we have compelling natural incentives for compliance. There's bipartisan support to act on and lead an issue that's at the forefront of everyone's minds across industry and government. And, as we work on this issue, we want to make sure that our doors are open to all policy makers and to everyone with a stake in the space economy. We can't get it right without you, and we're excited to be your partners. All right. Thank you, Commissioner Simington. And that would be another – the U.S. position in the global market, interesting since, as I mentioned, the outset we have the two leading companies, it appears will be U.S.-based, and that's significant. So, we're going to go to – move on to our discussion panel, but to lead us off, one of the panelists, Professor Whitney Lohmeyer, is going to show some slides so we'll – the other three can hold off so that we can all see it better. Whitney, come on up. Whitney is an assistant professor at Olin College of Engineering and co-author of a very recent and timely paper on spectrum rights and sharing in outer space that she did with some co-authors for Spectrum X, which is the relatively new big project that the National Science Foundation to do cutting-edge research on spectrum sharing. All right, Whitney. All right. So, hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you all today. As mentioned, some of these slides are in part from a presentation that some collaborators and I put together for TPRC, which is a telecommunications policy research conference in D.C. each year. And to give a little bit of background about myself quickly and about Spectrum X, I'm at Olin. I direct the Olin Satellite and Spectrum Technology Policy Group. I'm a PI at Spectrum X, which, like we heard, is this NSF initiative, $25 million over five years, to bring together researchers, academics, government affiliates, as well as industry, and think about some of these spectrum-related issues. And so a group of us, economists, electrical engineers, both focusing on hardware and software, came together when this NPRM came out, looking at NGSO sharing, and started reviewing what was in the document. So, in this presentation, I'm going to go over just the basics of LEO constellations, as well as their licensing regime, and then offer some of the potential policy outcomes that we discussed in our paper. So to get started, if you are to Google LEO satellite constellations and look at images, you might see something like this. For some, this is particularly scary when thinking about space from a sustainability perspective, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of satellites going up. For others, this is a huge time of success. There's an effort in the 90s, early 2000s, to connect the globe with satellite systems, and now we have systems that are real, that are operating, and are connecting over 400,000 people, as not so long ago. So also in 2019, it was the first year more than half the world had access to the internet, and we know that as we bring people online, we can support agricultural systems, education, healthcare, the economy, these things begin to flourish. And so I'm on the campus. I think this is a time for celebration. It's a huge success, and we need to wrestle with some of these policy challenges. And that some of the potentially most opportune ways to do this is bring together a diverse set of people from different backgrounds related to spectrum and outside of spectrum to think about some of these issues. I also find that even amongst crowds that spend their days focusing on the same material, this case satellite communications, that sometimes terminology can be still confusing. So we hear mega constellations, we hear Leo, we hear NGSOs, and these are words that have been used over the past few years. And today we're talking about Leo's or NGSO, so NGSO meaning non-geostationary orbit. This outer ring where you see ViyaSat, EchoStar, InMarsat, IntelSat, just a few of the geostationary providers offer critical services as well that are here to stay and orbit at around 35,000 kilometers. This critical orbit that if you put a satellite up, it's going to orbit at the same rate that the Earth rotates underneath it. So you put a satellite at the longitude of Washington, D.C., around 35,000 kilometers, and altitude it's going to stay there relatively. Now when we bring that altitude down, we enter NGSO territory. Same thing as if you were to actually extend it above Geo, it would technically still be NGSO, but we're focusing on low-Earth orbit satellites today. And in fact what's a little confusing is that these rules also apply to the MEO systems as well, so Empower, Mangata. And so these are just a few of the critical players, SpaceX, Kuiper, OneWeb, all listed here. In 2003, when we saw this, well, the kind of period of time when we started seeing some of the first efforts to connect to the world, Teladistic and Skybridge, tremendous efforts were being put forth to establish regulatory framework at the national FCC level, as well as internationally ITU establishment of EPFD limits, which protect and come at geostationary users, as well as at the national level processing round regimes. It's likely the case that when these rules were going to affect, there wasn't consideration for more than 20 entrants applying for applications, or the likelihood that there would be multiple rounds cascading afterwards. It was likely the case that the FCC anticipated few systems would apply, and that maybe one or two of them would become actualized. Today, we're in a different scenario, and so we're reviewing these processing round rules as well as sharing, and how we handle prioritizing these networks within a band and protecting, I'm sorry, within a round, and protecting same round systems as well as earlier round systems as well. So there have been four processing rounds since 2016 with one web kicking off the initial round. Ironically, myself and members of this room were a part of that first application that was ever submitted, and it was not anticipated then that, like I said, cascades of rounds would ensue. And effectively, what one could argue this is creating is this potential mentality that it's like, well, if I don't participate now, maybe there'll be an opportunity later down the road. And protection rules aren't clear, and so maybe I just weigh the benefit, especially noting that the surety bond requirements exist as well as milestone requirements exist for launching satellites into consideration. Another thing that's quite fascinating, so just in summary, more than 20 entities have filed across these four rounds for over 70,000 satellites, is that the timeline for authorization for determination of whether the grant is approved is increasing on average two years for the first and nearly three in the second. And in this study that, OSSDP, this group that I direct, 30 undergraduate students also entering into the field, the study looked at these different rounds and who were the players. And here's a figure that shows the scenario of just how real this is, right? We've got two networks alone, OneWeb and Starlink, who have already started launching satellites, the total number reaching around 4,000 in orbit at the moment. And again, I look at this, I think this is a huge success. Like I said, we're connecting 400,000 people, and now it's just the time that we're going to revise the rules and come up with appropriate policy strategies. And so to help with this, in April of 2020, SpaceX petitioned the FCC to review these NGOsO sharing rules. And these rules, some of which are codified in 25.261. So here's a screenshot, this isn't the CFR, it's actually a website I use often and highly recommend. If you just type in 25.261 FCC, you go to Cornell Law School, and they have all of the regs for you with hyperlinks, which are exceptionally accessible. But you'll see some bolded words here. Coordination, default procedure, delta T over T exceeds 6%. Band will be divided amongst the affected satellite networks. And these are just a few of the key elements of 25.261 that the FCC welcomed comments on. So how do we protect systems from interference? Is this level of protection delta T over T of 6% adequate? Does protection sunset over time better enabling new entrants to participate? And how do earlier systems remain protected, especially from later systems coming in? And so of course, with these comments, policy questions ensued, how do we share beam pointing information in a way that doesn't give away confidential information? And is this coordination trigger appropriate? What happens for band segmentation? And this is exactly what the Spectrum X collaborators and I came together and we started looking at. And it's exactly also what industry responded to the FCC about. And just to sort of paint the picture of the room at Spectrum X, the majority of the co-authors were from fields outside of satellite, which actually at first I found a little bit frustrating, but at the end offered something quite interesting. And when we had come together, they would talk about auctions. Maybe their background was terrestrial in a system where similarly they have allocations for fixed service, whereas we have allocations for fixed satellite service. But at the FCC, these bands are auctioned off. So a network receives a sliver of the entire allocated band, whereas satellite systems, as we've heard, but just to reiterate, they share the exact same frequencies at the same time. And so they have to rely on coordination, literally sitting across the table as you're sitting and sharing discussions amongst legal teams and engineering teams on how they're going to coexist. And they effectively sign a written document at the end of the day saying, okay, this will work. And so when it came time for my colleagues and I to sit down and talk and they would propose auctions, I immediately just was frustrated and said, guys, this will never work. Like these networks are already billions of dollars. They're never going to participate in an auction, which is also cost intensive, to auction off the exact same asset. Like this doesn't make sense. And so rightfully, they were saying, well, let's take a step back, because while not all of these sharing regimes may apply to satellite networks, some of them, grounded from terrestrial experience, may offer insights. And let's also avoid this kind of blueprint thinking or old versus new mantra. And let's consider the fact that satellite systems have orbits and mechanics that govern these sorts of orbits, as well as movement on the ground. A similar scenario as a cellular system that is 2D, but now you've got this third dimension that's moving overhead, as well as antennas pointing and tracking the lower earth systems as well. And having numerous policy and economists, really experts on this team, they said, let's look at this from a property rights analysis point of view. And again, I threw up my hands and I said property, like this isn't property. And so we had this conversation and it was around property rights versus access rights. And so we landed with terminology that we kind of use both, but that we note that while spaces are commons and the number of networks are increasing and coordination right now is arguably effective with SpaceX and One Web reaching coordination, numerous other networks in the process of it, interference hasn't been claimed yet. But these property rights include governing regime for access. And maybe that regime is flexible and maybe while spectrum isn't going to be auctioned, what if priority, for example, the round in which you're participating could be traded, right? And so this is not necessarily the view forward that SpectrumX is proposing, but it's more a request that as policy makers come together that we think about some of these questions and maybe new ways of thinking. There is different forms of governance, a self-governance or decentralized approach, or we mandate strict regulations, which likely are not necessary at this exact time given that we haven't reached a point in which folks are claiming interference, but also noting we don't want to get to that point and not have some sort of guidelines in place. And we highlight too that coordination requires a sharing of information. We have to do this in a way that maintains confidentiality of users, especially given that a large portion of the market for these networks is government or enterprise. And so how do we protect that commercially sensitive information? And going back to this kind of property rights assessment, the economics of this, thinking about what incentives govern these networks and coordination. And right now one could argue that these systems are incentivized to avoid band segmentation, right? We coordinate because if we can't reach agreement when this coordination threshold has met, then the rule is that we split the band by the number of networks involved in this interference situation, one over N. And it occurs during these interference events, which are on the order of seconds. But the fact is, going back to this initial processing round definition in 2003, we didn't have a scenario in which there were over 20 entrants potentially at play here, you know, with 10 per round. And so we need to think about the fact that band segmentation exists. Right now it's hard to fathom that someone might claim interference when it isn't actually happening, but what if down the road that came to be? And also with this processing round approach, moving kind of a step back from band segmentation, reviewing it from a means that there's also an incentive to file fast and file for the largest system possible, due to the way that modifications are defined. And reviewed. And what we want to be doing, what the initial intent of this processing round approach was for, was for efficiency and the appropriate allocation of systems to these bands. And we're seeing filings for, like we said, combined over 70,000 satellites. This is likely because you can modify your network as long as you don't increase your interference environment. And we're actually incentivizing for what I would argue to be an inefficient path forward when it comes to these processing round filings. So in closing, what we left this with is a few things to think about. So what if we considered some form of open access in a way we kind of are already? No constraints, use coordination as the gold standard. It's not an issue yet. What are the pros and cons of this approach? Database driven sharing. We've talked about exchanging beam pointing information. There are terrestrial systems like CBRS and white space that are open and use databases to share information to assess frequency bands that are available for use. Is there any sort of insight that these could offer to us while we think about revising and GSO sharing? And then also the bit that I initially just wrote off when it came to trading priority rights or trading elements, maybe micro auctions. Are there things like this that we could take advantage of from previously implemented terrestrial networks or other systems that could potentially benefit our industry? And so that's what I have. I do want to reiterate, I think this is a time of success. And that it's a time of opportunity for us to figure out these policy questions and solutions to them. And I look forward to chatting more about this with some of the folks who are coming up now. Yeah, just anywhere. Thank you, Whitney. Yeah, that is a super helpful overview. And I don't think most people know all of that. So I'd invite the three panelists to come up now and we'll have our discussion. So, David, you put you on the spot first. At least on the spectrum sharing side, you are responsible for this in part for this current rulemaking. As I think Whitney noted that SpaceX filed the petition for rulemaking in 2020 that opened all these issues. So I don't know if you could tell us what were you trying to achieve with the petition and do you think the FCC is headed in the right direction? Sure. Yeah, first, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Thanks for everyone coming out. Yeah, so I guess backing up a little kind of little time machine of like what was going on at the time and what we were thinking. I think you heard from Whitney that that was great description. And I think if anyone got a takeaway from that, it's the way that we do NGSO licensing is kind of messed up. I think that was the bottom line I got. And the reason is so it's the the issue is is that the FCC's rules were that they have these things called processing rounds. We've heard it referenced a few times. It's essentially an application window. So essentially what the FCC's rules say is if someone comes in and wants to do satellite one of these non-geostationary orbit systems, you come and tell the FCC you're interested and that triggers effectively an application window. And what the FCC says at that point is anyone else who's interested in doing this speak now or forever hold your piece. And then you come in, but they say actually you don't have to forever hold your piece. You can come back later and we'll figure out what to do at that point. And for a long time, I think this was somewhat sustainable because for the most part and GSOs didn't survive very long. They would file applications and it just didn't really happen. And so the rules didn't really think about what happens when there's if systems actually survive, if systems actually deploy, and other systems want to come in later. And so what happened when we were applying was that where I think most of the systems, if not all, had gotten their licenses from the first, the 2016 application window processing round. And we're starting to deploy and we're kind of, we were having friendly debates with the FCC about how the rules actually should play out within the rule. But then Amazon came and applied and it became clear that there was going to likely be another processing round that follows on. And again, the FCC was the only rule at that point was we'll figure that out later, what we're going to do with that. So we had petitioned at that point to say it probably would be helpful to have rules that describe how this should work. Some of this, I think a lot of people understood and kind of within the industry there was some concept of how this should play out, but it wasn't really prescribed. So we filed a petition with kind of the main goal. The main kind of overview was the, we like competition. There should be more operators. We should be encouraging that to happen that there needs to be, these things are really, really expensive. We heard it a few times already. These things are really expensive. Your license has to mean something. I know you've had a lot of C-band conversations in this room. There's the discussion of your license has to mean something or else no one's actually going to ever deploy. And so how do you make sure that you put enough value in these licenses that, so if you keep and share its spectrum, if you just keep adding more and more users in it, the value of your license shrinks over time. It's the only place I could think of actually within FCC licenses that your license becomes less valuable over time as more users come in and try to share the same space. So how do we preserve some semblance of some value there that's enough to spend the billions of dollars it takes to deploy the system? And the other kind of guidepost for us was in this environment, the best thing we could think of of how to come together was that you want rules. These are all default rules. Everything we're talking about are the default rules. Really what you want are the operators to sit down together and work it out amongst themselves. Now, these are all competing systems. It works out exactly the way you think it works when you tell a bunch of competing systems to get in and figure it out for yourself. So how do you set the incentives, the correct way to get people to behave properly? And so we kind of came up with basically two high-level points. One was later rounds should somehow protect the earlier rounds, and that's how you preserve the value of the earlier systems. But at some point, the protection has to sunset, has to go away. So essentially, what the thought was there is that if you only say that the first round is protected by later rounds, the first round has no incentive to ever sit down and coordinate and ever come to an agreement. Because if I can build a really hugely inefficient, bad system, I can block out anybody in the future. So what I really want to be able to do, or I mean as policy, what you really want to be able to do is have protections where it's enough that you get return on your investment. But then over time that protection goes away, and that should create the right incentives for both sides to want to sit down and negotiate and kind of come to the right terms. The other thing that we did in there though is the other problem you have is if you have an early round system and you're being protected, is you have every incentive to build a hugely inefficient system. Because you can say as long as I'm being protected, I'm just going to build basically a junky system that takes up as much spectrum as I can and you have to figure out how to work around it. So we also put in an incentive that, I think Whitney talked a little bit about it, the spectrum splitting. That basically when the spectrum, when you have an inline event, I talk about as the ghostbuster rule, you don't really want to cross the streams. But so you want to have it, what the FCC's rule is, as Whitney said, was that you split the spectrum there. What we proposed is the first choice of spectrum when that happens should go to the more spectrally efficient system. And that way rather than the race to the bottom that you have of like I want to box everyone out, I actually turn out better on spectrum if I'm more efficient. And so you can flip the race to the bottom to a race at the top to try to increase, to make everyone kind of driven towards a more efficient system. So I apologize, I've been talking a lot so I'll try to cut off here. The second part, how do I think things are going? I think I'm excited we're here. And I think there are a handful of things that it seems like if you look at the record that a lot of people agree on, the kind of first round protections, it seems like everyone agrees. The importance of good faith coordination seems like everyone agrees. I think there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be worked out. And so I am encouraged and I think we're excited for the FCC to take the next step and kind of drive down on some of those harder or weirier issues and kind of drive to conclusion on those as well. All right. Yeah, thanks, David. That's really helpful. Let me go to the later entrant next, Julie with Project Kuiper. So how does the NPRM set the stage for a more competitive ecosystem? And what's the role of incentives there? Are we going to get the incentives right? So I think the commission is taking the right approach. We are, as was mentioned before, part of the 2020 processing round, which means we coordinate with those within the 2020 round when they are licensed, but we're also coordinating with those in the 2016 prior processing round. So it's particularly important to us there being no rules at this time about how that coordination between rounds should be taking place, that we make decisions on this. In the rulemaking, the commission is trying to balance three particular objectives. The first is protecting investment of prior licensees. The second is competition. And the third is that efficient use of spectrum. And in the latter regard, we think that the degraded throughput approach is the right approach. It sets a standard for a term of permissible interference. That's already used, frankly, by operators coordinating in good faith, but establishes a baseline as a starting point. I think we spend a lot of time in coordination discussions about not just exchanging parameters, but what is your protection threshold that you're demanding before we actually get to the analysis that gets us to the solutions. So having that degraded throughput approach is the right starting point for non-GSO systems, particularly because it takes into account the actual operational capabilities of the systems. It starts from where you are. It calculates where you're going in the presence of another operator and looks at the difference. And so you're not blanketing the entire United States or service area with the same standard. You're looking at the actual situation as it exists. This is an approach that the United States has done a number of studies on into the International Telecommunication Union study process. It's been adopted by the ITU in the V-band, the 40-50 gigahertz band. It's been supported by the TACC and others. And a lot of the commenters in this rulemaking process have supported this approach. And I think it would be a big step to set that expectation for good faith coordination between operators. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, we should come back to get everyone's view on the degraded throughput and whatever interference metric. I know the Commissioner Starks emphasized actual interference as being a very important tenet here. But before that, I want to ask Harold about the positions that public knowledge and filing with my work with OTI and with some other public interest groups had in their comments filed in March. What is the perspective of the public interest advocates on satellite spectrum sharing? So I want to first thank SpaceX for actually doing some creative thinking around this. The sad thing for me listening to Wendy's presentation was you get a whole bunch of smart people in the room and they're like, we are going to recapitulate every single idea that has ever happened in spectrum and not be original at all. So the fact that SpaceX put a lot of effort into trying to come up with ways to address these problems is, I think, a very important step here. And I want to make sure that it's understood that even though we may disagree on some of these things, there's a lot of appreciation for committing to try to use this. Our positions have been that we've learned a lot about spectrum sharing from terrestrial use and that spectrum sharing generally should be encouraged. That what we've seen particularly in the unlicensed realm, although in some of these, you know, more hybrid realms like CBRS, which is relatively new, but also TV white spaces, is that, number one, there tends to be a rush by those who are using the spectrum to claim that there is interference if there's some kind of interference protection right. I think one of the most important things the commission did very early in the, when we had a separate band in 3.65, 3.75, was to say, yeah, we're not going to get involved. And there were some folks who said that was the first band where we had this sort of terrestrial, you have to negotiate in good faith, but we're not going to tell you how that's going to come out. And there were some folks who came in initially said, oh, we've tried to negotiate and the commission said, well, too bad. Either you're not going to be able to use the spectrum or you're going to figure out a way to share the spectrum. And that creates a very, that aligns the incentives very well among the participants, particularly where there is a comparatively small number of participants. Now, again, the question of how many of these systems are we going to get, that raises some of the questions that I know folks have been concerned about, but, you know, it's one thing when it's thousands of, you know, hot spots competing with each other, it's another thing when, you know, is it 10, is it even like, oh my God, 15? Part of this is also going to be how many competitors is the marketplace going to support? I mean, we want as many competitors as possible, but it's not just the expense and it's not just the, you know, the need to get a return on investment from the interference protection, but it's also just there is a natural limit to how many competitors there are for this particular segment of the market. Now, on the good side, the fact that we see terrestrial network operators now teaming with satellite is undoubtedly going to help to sustain the satellite industry and that number has increased. But I frankly am somewhat dubious that the number of folks who are going to try to do NGSOs who could be supported in a competitive marketplace is going to exceed the ability of the operators to negotiate in good faith. And we stressed in our comments that there's a lot to be said for the good faith, the negotiation requirement, to the extent we need to have some sort of protection, it should be carefully calibrated so as not to encourage what, you know, David identified as the problem of first and time, first and right, which is the capture the flag, get as much up as you can and then, you know, slam the door behind you. So that is one issue. I think we're a little more concerned about how necessary is it and what safeguards should you have that operators don't just automatically default to a, well, we must have some kind of, you know, resolution protection regime where having greater incentive to continue to do coordination is valuable. The other area was we agree that there needs to be a disclosure on sufficient information to do good faith coordination. And, again, we have, I won't say a suspicion, but it's a default kind of thing. Experience shows that companies prefer to keep everything proprietary, even things that don't need to be necessarily need to be proprietary. How much information needs to be available and to whom? Because one of the issues is, like, okay, you could keep this confidential for coordination using, you know, kind of standard NDAs, that sort of thing, but then you have the problem of people who are looking at whether they want to enter into the market need to have some sense of how difficult is it going to be for us to engage coordination. We saw recently in the 2.5 gigahertz band where this problem emerged of, okay, how could people make a judgment for auction purposes if they didn't know what the layout was going to be and how they were going to have to coordinate with the existing users. So we believe that there needs to be, when considering the question of how much disclosure and whether to treat these things as proprietary, we urge always err on the side of making the information accessible and that preferably it would be the commission rather than the companies deciding on this balancing, of course, with the fact that if the commission is going to have to make that judgment, it's variably going to take it a while to make these decisions. But, again, we're kind of concerned about this and want to make sure that the value of the public disclosure is properly appreciated. Finally, in the realm of the interference and degraded throughput, our issue really is the certainty that can be applied here. The FCC is doing a receiver standards, NOI, we put in a proposal there that there ought to be an assumption about what a standard receiver does. And the FCC sets its rules based on the robustness and assumed robustness if you want to have substandard receivers that will experience more interference but they're cheaper and you have other reasons why you want to do it, fine. And we may want to consider an approach like this as we move forward because the different uses that we're looking at are going to have different thresholds not just for the level of robustness in the system but the interference that is tolerable to a user. If we're projecting terrestrial uses, for example, the economics there are likely to be very different than satellite base stations for fixed locations and it may make sense given where users of terrestrial networks are likely to need supplementary satellite use to say, well, okay, maybe we care a little less about the level of harmful interference there because we expect the uses to be in more isolated areas where the terrestrial networks are not available and we care more in these sort of situated base station situations. Again, it's just a question of there ought to be some definite measurements to the extent possible and we should be cautious about evaluation of the degradation of throughput because, again, kind of one of the problems that we've seen over the years in the terrestrial usage is whenever there are new users, the existing users are quick to complain that any kind of interference is from the new neighbors and we all know that systems can be subject to interference from any of a wide variety of reasons including changes in atmospheric conditions, things that have nothing to do with the new neighbor. So as we look at the question of resolution of who's responsible for interference in the degradation of throughput, we need to be very careful knowing that it's not necessarily going to be a certainty ever about where the source is but to not just assume automatically that the source of throughput degradation, particularly if it's transient, repetitive perhaps but overall transient that it necessarily comes from other users in the band. All right. Thanks, Harold. So, yeah, I think we want to look at some of these specific issues on spectrum, on the satellite spectrum sharing in the NPRM but first I actually want to take one step back again. I think Whitney's presentation in particular showed how Leo constellations are different technically in terms of their orbit but although satellite broadband has been around for years, the Leos offer potentially different use cases, capabilities, affordability. So I'm wondering if you all, I guess particularly David and Julie but anyone can just fill us in a little more on that. So it's not just that because, for example, Biasat as we saw from the orbital diagram, they've been providing broadband for years from a geosynchronous orbit far out there and so how is it different now with your constellations? Yeah, no, that's great and thank you for the question. I think that it's a lot of people, this is like we're talking another language and I know like terms like NGSO and stuff gets thrown out as though this is English that we're speaking and so that is a great question and yeah if you don't mind, I'll just spend a couple minutes kind of describing even just what the technology is that we're talking about. It's traditionally satellite, so launch traditionally has been very, very expensive. We heard a few times that how much launch is kind of accelerating. Launch traditionally had been very, very expensive and very infrequent and one of the consequences of that is that if you wanted to build satellite systems you actually wanted them to be relatively far from the Earth because you wanted to be able to, with as few satellites as possible, see as much of the Earth as you can, you don't have to launch as much to do that because it's too expensive, it's too hard. As launch, the price and the accessibility of launch has come down, one of the things that, well, let me back up, one of the consequences of that, of having satellites, a few satellites that are up further away is just even at the speed of light which is what these signals transmit at, even at the speed of light, it still takes time to get the signal from Earth to the satellite and back down. And so that's where you get this latency, you get kind of delays in the service and also if you only have a handful, satellites eventually become capacity constrained. And so what's happened is as launch has become more accessible as the technology has evolved, the same technology that you're now using terrestrially, we can now use in space too, as we're moving from 3G to 4G to 5G, some of these same antenna ideas can be put in space. As you're doing that, excuse me, we can now move the satellites down closer to the Earth because the problem with being close to the Earth originally was that you don't see enough of the Earth with them, it takes too many satellites to actually have ubiquitous coverage. Now you can bring the satellites closer to the Earth, you can put up more of them, so then you can actually keep increasing your throughput over time, your capacity over time, but also your latency, your bounce back and forth is now equivalent to terrestrial. And so it's just you're now getting, you're going from 600, 700 milliseconds bouncing back and forth, which makes like real-time video hard to 20 to 30 millisecond bounce back and forth, and so that starts becoming indistinguishable from a terrestrial system. There are satellites that takes a lot more launching, but I think, and again, you can increase capacity over time by putting out more satellites, so I think that's where you start seeing the differences, it's in the latency and the ability to kind of improve the system over time as opposed to just having some satellites that stay up for a longer period of time. Julie, if you want to add in terms of, and particularly just the two, and also when you're thinking about, you know, the Piper's constellation, you know, what kind of use cases and capabilities it's adding to the mix? The low latency is very important in terms of driving the use cases, and it is a fiber-like experience, but it's also continuous coverage between certain latitude bands. In our case, 56 north to 56 south, we can cover over 95% of the world's population with Project Kuiper. And having small spot beams and sub beams, we're able to very specifically target customers and provide the best possible service. Also able to deal with interference scenarios by choosing satellite A instead of satellite B to serve Earth Station C. So you have this diversity in space that you don't have with a geostationary network that helps you deal with these interference issues. In terms of use cases, certainly direct to consumer broadband to the home, enterprise cases, emergency services, government services, services to schools and hospitals, all of that is anticipated Kuiper services. I just want to add, nobody anticipated that war between Russia and Ukraine was going to be a major use case for SpaceX's system, and yet it is. To a certain extent, it is difficult, and we see this problem constantly, to anticipate what the use cases are definitely going to be when we have these things up there. That's one of the reasons, of course, why we want multiple competitors up there so that we have capacity to sustain or alternatively where you may have countries that are experiencing hostility towards each other and somebody shuts off the system. It is useful to have multiple providers so that the citizens of that country may not be left without broadband, and these were entirely unforeseen. But now we can look at them and see that they matter. Yeah, probably natural disasters as well. The key thing is about it, that everything that we're talking about is possible use cases, you don't have to have the ground infrastructure in place already in order to be able to get this. You don't have to have fiber to the area, you don't have to have any kind of terrestrial infrastructure there already. You can move in with the dishes immediately, and they immediately overnight can provide service. I think that's really, so it's true. I don't know that we know all the use cases yet, but where we have seen it is absolutely in natural disasters. When there's a hurricane that hit New Orleans, we were able to go in and basically overnight have internet connection. Fires in Germany, we could just go in overnight and have internet connection. And over again we're seeing it where there's places where you haven't really thought about it before, of what happens when they need connection and there's just nothing built out there. And a terrestrial system takes more time to be able to pull that off, whereas we can get basically terrestrial, urban-like internet to basically any point on earth overnight. Yeah, including on an RV or a bookmobile. So we call it a fixed satellite service, and yet it will probably be nomadic. Naming and the satellite stuff needs a little work. Okay. So again, I think taking this from Commissioner Starks, he seemed to be articulating that he wants to find this balance between enough certainty to encourage investment, but low barriers to entry for competition. So how important is having multiple competitive NGSO operators to help close a digital divide or for other purposes? It's going to take all of us being successful to close the digital divide, and there may be a divide left five, ten years from now. So it's super important that the competition element be there and the ability to introduce new entrants. I wanted to mention as well getting back to the rulemaking, the issue of information sharing and how important that is to enabling operators to go beyond fear of interference to actually addressing real interference cases. And to do that, you have to share information. There will be many more instances where earth stations and satellites are in alignment geometrically than there are instances where that geometric alignment results in interference because of the transmitting and receiving that's taking place on the part of both operators. And I'll draw sort of a parallel to what the commission asks of operators in terms of space safety. We all have to share our ephemera state over with each other and we all have to coordinate with each other to avoid conjunctions. It is possible to share real-time information and to avoid these situations ahead of time rather than assume that every situation is a disaster waiting to happen or an interference event in the making. And that gives you much more efficient use of spectrum when you're able to provide service to a customer instead of not provide service because you're concerned about interference event that doesn't really exist. From a consumer perspective, having multiple operators is critical for several reasons. One is obviously price and level of service and dedicated service to particular markets. All of these sort of traditional consumer market reasons why we want competing systems. But additionally, redundancy is a form of resiliency and we need to recognize that the elements of a satellite network as with any network are not just spectrum plus satellites in air. There are a lot of things that can happen in the operation of a network. Any single network can experience difficulties for any of a variety of reasons. There is a reason why multi-homing is popular. Even consumers do multi-homing in the form of I've got one internet connection that's my mobile phone and the other that I have to my home. That's a form of multi-homing. I may prefer to use my home internet most of the time but when it goes out I have my phone that I'm able to use to continue to call into work or whatever. Zoom into work of course. So we shouldn't overlook the importance of multiple systems as just a form of network reliability that ensures that because particularly if we're talking about use cases where people are isolated they're relying on this as their primary internet connection we need to recognize every network is going to have a day when it goes down. And being able to have multiple available networks so that if this is your one connection and you decide you really need to pay for access to a second network just in case that is important. It's also important in the context of the public safety applications that we were talking about where if this is what you're using because a hurricane came through, a wildfire came through you're probably going to want to have a backup system. So I guess I don't get to do this very often. I'm the bearer of good news. The record in this proceeding is for the most part all over the place. There's very little agreement on a lot of these issues but we've gone through it pretty thoroughly. I don't think anyone has argued against competition. I think that it is unanimous that there should be competition and there should be more operators. I think it sounds like I'm guessing that we're probably unanimous on the panel. I think that the record is unanimous. I'm guessing the commission is not anti-competition. So I think we're good. In fact, our original proposal actually suggested to sunset interference protections for our own system and I have not done a thorough search on this but we may be the first licensee at the FCC to argue to sunset their own interference protections and the point was let's bring more competition in. Remember, some of this is self-interested. We're a launch provider. We want to launch more satellites. It's great. I don't think there's any dispute on that. Circling a little bit back on what Julie was talking about and information sharing, a little bit more good news. We do a lot of coordination with a lot of different systems. I don't think we've come across an issue yet where sharing information was the problem. We've had a lot of issues. This is difficult. It is a hard problem to solve of getting how do you get all of these different systems with all kinds of different architecture to all work together is a difficult problem. But one of the issues that I don't think we've really come across is that operators are withholding information from each other. It's not anyone's interest. If I'm withholding information that's critical for someone to be able to avoid interference with me, I'm the one who loses. I think we actually have the proper incentive set up there for people to sit down and be able to provide information. I want to tell you where my ground infrastructure is because I want you to make sure that you're protecting it if you're supposed to protect it or if nothing else that we're avoiding each other. A lot of times in these conversations is we're talking about sorry to throw more terminology, I apologize, but the gateway is essentially the connection back into the internet, back into the fiber. We don't really want those to be on top of each other. If we're using the same frequency, we don't want to be beaming into the same place, we cause interference. We're sharing information about where these things are, where we're planning on putting them to make sure that different operators are putting them on top of each other. I think the incentives are there. Like I said, I luckily get to be the bearer of good news is I think everyone's on board with competition and I think information sharing doesn't seem to be a big blocker at this point. Okay, so we want more operators, more competition. I think most of not all of us share Whitney's going in reaction that we don't want auctions for spectrum rights and shared satellite bands, but that probably comes down then to how feasible is good faith coordination. That's been the gold standard for the FCC to get voluntary coordination agreements and the same round rules pushed and incentive in that direction. There's also evidence that operators have been able to coordinate under the existing rules. For example, SpaceX just entered with an agreement with one web and you're the two largest up there and there was also a coordination agreement between Amazon and Telesat. So I guess what can we do? It seems like a lot of this comes down to incentives then. So what can we do in the proceeding to ensure that good faith coordination can take us as far as we can get and use the spectrum as efficiently as we can? Whitney, you want to start with that? Yeah, I'll add a few thoughts. I think there is precedent for what we also call... So there's coordination amongst two parties. There's also multilateral coordination and that's where multiple parties come together. There may actually be a point. There's been conversations even prior to work, 15 on bringing in multilateral coordination and generally what happens is challenges with this concept are posed and it doesn't make necessarily as much headway. What's an interesting use case is another service, RNSS, Radio Navigation Satellite Services. They have this kind of multilateral coordination process where they effectively come together in order to ensure that they won't reach some kind of aggregate interference with other systems that share the band. And what's been interesting with this use case is that in coming together more than one party, they've never reached this kind of aggregate limit issue. And so I guess a few words to just say that I do think information sharing is possible. It's intimidating and a lot of times in the back of the hall as folks will say operators will never share this info but it's really at the end of the day just time to all come together to the table whether it's under the definition of multilateral coordination or not. It's going to take some sort of organized entity like how we share with ephemeris for collision avoidance to ensure that interference isn't happening at the feeder link or the service link. And what's also fascinating in that you're sharing these same frequencies is that in the gateway side, which is like we heard connected to fiber, there's some flexibility there. You can put these 50 to 100 or so or less antennas in specific locations and avoid each other. What's tricky can be on the user side where you're blanketing that frequency all over the earth, those same bands. And so the OneWeb system, a different beam crossed overhead every 11 seconds, a different satellite crossed overhead over three minutes. And we talked about kind of this cyclic sort of interference even if it's intermittent, like maybe you would have an 11 second interference occurring every day or something or so. And it's going to take some sort of organization like the players at hand to come together and sit at a table and come up with some sort of system to share. The incentives are you can't hurt somebody else without hurting yourself. And that becomes a big incentive because as David was saying, look, if there's interference, it's likely to be mutual interference. We don't want systems on top of each other. That's already a big alignment of incentives. The other, frankly, is we want to encourage resolution of potential interference problems in other segments of the system. Interference is not radio waves destroying each other through some sort of, you know, mutual destruction there, which is a problem of the receiver not being able to interpret the simultaneous signal on the same set of frequencies. We've gotten a lot better since the old days on how we can improve the robustness of the receiver. Some of these are things that we've talked about like antenna tilt. There are certain technologies that have not been deployed but have been talked about frequently like beaconing. Encouraging operators to simultaneously coordinate with each other to the extent they can while also leaving some incentive for them to improve the capabilities of their receivers is another way in which we address and enhance the spectrum efficiency. And everybody's going to have the same incentives unless you create the FCC as an attractive nuisance. And the minute it becomes plausible to go running to the FCC to have them resolve the technical question, that's when voluntary coordination breaks down because then the incentive is to try to get what you want out of the FCC rather than needing to negotiate with everyone else. So part of what we can do is minimize the extent to which the FCC is going to insert itself into resolution of conflicts which is counterintuitive to a lot of folks but it has been effective in, to some extent, in unlicensed and in other shared spectrum and it's really something to remember here as we're setting things up. And one additional point on that is there's time to things that you're trying to drive people to do here. You want people to sit down to coordinate. You also want people, and I think Harold was hitting on this, is you also want people to, when they coordinate, have systems that are good at sharing. And I think, actually, that second point is what's missing in the rules because we do have stuff where it's driving people to actually sit down to coordinate but there's not, as I was referencing earlier, you sit down, you actually get an incentive for sitting down and saying, let's coordinate, my system's really bad, you're out of way to work around it. And that's how you kind of box out competitors and take as much, many frequencies as you possibly can. You have to somehow flip that and that's something that I think is missing from the rules. You were asking earlier about, what do we think about the proceeding? I think one of the things that was disappointing to us about this proceeding is that we had proposed that this was a necessary step, including something that drives people to be efficient is a necessary precondition to getting good coordination and the FCC hinted at it but kind of left that on the table. And so I think we're hoping that there is a further notice that pushes this, pushes the issue and starts driving to a better resolution that includes this component to it because otherwise, not only within a round where you're co-equal, do you want to build an inefficient system under the current rules, but in a world where there's some level of protection to the later round, you're really in a bad spot and fear the later round and the earlier rounds have an incentive to be inefficient. What you really want to do is try to drive everyone to build better sharing systems in addition to sitting down to coordinate. Julie, what do you think about that? Is it feasible to get into this? An incentive in the coordination between systems in the same round is that delta T over T of 6% rule that if you're not coordinated and you're exceeding that, you have to split the spectrum. The fact that that hasn't happened shows that that incentive is working. I think in terms of incenting coordination between rounds, there's the degraded throughput in information sharing and then sunsetting, which David raised initially in the rulemaking and earlier today, knowing that at some point in time two parties are going to be at an equal status. Not reversing their status. Well, you used to have priority and now I have priority, but at an equal status, it's going to incent the earlier round licensee to coordinate in good faith. Yeah, so when you mentioned degraded throughput, you're reminding me to come back. I promise to come back to that issue and then we'll open for audience questions. So be thinking if you have anything you want to ask. But particularly between rounds, whether it is prioritization in the future, a central issue is how best to define and measure interference. So I guess I'd ask to come back to, definitely to Julie and Harold and all of you, because I know that both Project Kuiper and the public interest organizations argue that degradation of service is a better measure of interference for that purpose. That is better than the sort of static interference to noise ratio that is then the traditional satellite metric. And the FCC's technical advisory committee has also recommended degraded throughput as a metric best suited for NGSO sharing. So why is that? Why the one versus the other? Because we haven't yet mentioned, right, that interference to noise, which I'm calling a static measure. If you're a consumer, you're going to care, is my service there or not there? Has it slowed down or not? You're going to be oblivious to changes in that satellite's noise temperature. What you care about is your service. And that's one of the reasons why degraded throughput really works in this instance. Because it's actual interference to the customer's experience. It's a before and after experience. What's funny is harmful interference is essentially degraded throughput. In terms of its sort of abstract definition, what is harmful interference? It's interference that degrades the service sufficiently that... And then the definition sort of trails off because we don't have really good definitions for that. But traditionally, what you're calling the static measure has been what happens when the FCC says we think that this number represents the relevant protection to protect against degradation of throughput sufficient to be considered harmful interference. So essentially what this is saying is, hey, rather than try to guess at some sort of national threshold, let's just go with that and go with what people care about and the users care about, which is my system working, and especially is my system working according to a reasonable expectation. This has again come up in the context of multiple proceedings when we did the low-power FM proceeding. For example, the notion of user expectation of what is harmful interference for an FM radio is very different from what it is for certain types of communication. And we have ways that we should be looking at to measure the dynamic nature of the actual degradation of throughput as it's happening, so that we can see whether it's transient, whether it is a systemic issue, whether it is something that is genuinely degrading throughput over time. And I think that this is a potentially very powerful tool to be applied not simply in this service, but to the extent that it proves itself here, could be applied in other services as well, essentially kind of cutting out the imaginary calculation on what constitutes harmful interference and saying, hey, actually measure whether the interference is harmful or not. It also provides some incentive to, or could potentially provide incentive to maximize the efficiency of your system because the FCC, you know, we could have some scale which says, you know, this is what we're counting as throughput degradation, you know, today. We're going to have a different scale at some point in the future that may require you to increase the efficiency of your system or what you're getting won't be considered a throughput degradation. You're supposed to be upgrading these sorts of things over time. That's hard to do, and that's probably too big a step to take in this proceeding, but it's something to think about if we're actually measuring real throughput degradation rather than simply getting a signal-to-noise ratio. David, Whitney, any different view? Yeah, so the record is actually kind of all over the place on this. The FCC traditionally in satellite land has used interference over noise metric. It's a little bit of a coarser metric to do it. All of it, by the way, just to back up, so people understand actually how this is done, the operators will run simulations to try to figure out. There's a certain level of interference over noise is basically the operators will run fancy computers that will simulate the two systems and figure out whether the interference over noise ticks off or not. Degraded throughput is a similar, you run an analysis on that simulation. Degraded throughput, so there's interference over noise, so you have your baseline of noise and does the interference go higher, does the signal go higher than that? There's how much our later systems are allowed to degrade the service for customers of earlier round systems and that's the degraded throughput is that the later system would then degrade service to the customers that are there. That also will be a simulated thing that the operators have to figure out and need to calculate that. But we're leaving out an important piece of that which is that's an average number and another aspect if you're going to go that route that the interference of noise is a little coarser is all of this, but if you go the degraded throughput the other piece is unavailability and it's a little bit what Harold was talking about is like you can average and you say it's a certain level of service that we're degrading to the customers but if you're averaging it over amount of time that means that sometimes that throughput is really being degraded and other times there's less and so you need to also include an analysis of is a system becoming completely unavailable? So if you're going to do the degraded service you need to also include into that how many times or is the later system actually cutting off service for someone and some of these systems that are being deployed cutting off service takes them a while to re-initiate. It's not like you just have a momentary blackout. If you're on a zoom your signal goes down it takes you a while to get back in you got to get back into the conversation. If we're going to start talking about how much are later rounds allowed to degrade service to early rounds customers you can't just go with the average you also need to figure in what are the swings in this and are the swings so dramatic that it actually cuts off service? There's a few other proposals that are in the record as well I don't know if they've gotten as much traction but again one of the reasons we think the FCC should now kind of zero in with a further notice is like pick out here's the two that are people like saying are the main ones and let's start focusing on those and let's start zeroing in comments from there. Any additional thoughts? Nothing major I will just echo that it's important to keep in mind how these are actually implemented before the systems are deployed and then also when it comes time right so there's the coordination trigger that we're talking about which means coordination should take place effectively but then it's once the systems are deployed is there a concern that folks will claim degraded throughput is occurring after the simulations have taken place and I think we hear that has to be time based whether you measure it over I over N our systems inherently in the waveform can tell you all of this information or you take a step further and you talk about data rate and availability we have the means in these systems to compute this now it's just both how do we look at this before systems are developed to understand how we're going to operate them and then once they're developed how do we ensure that when someone claims interference is occurring that we have a method for assessing whether interference is... And this is where real time measurements can make a huge difference to a certain extent if you're the network operator you want to know this for efficiency but it also provides real evidence that there is significant degradation of throughput or as David was saying it may be transitory but it's significant when it occurs but it's actually there and it's real as opposed to claims of significant degradation when they're not occurring and those may not be from the issue is those may not even be from a desire to put in false claims it is sometimes hard to know the source of spectrum interference and therefore as a first step proving from the function of the network and from the specific equipment that's experiencing the throughput degradation to the extent that you can show that yeah this is source interference and not a network glitch that occurred elsewhere in the system that's significant. The evidence is so important. Yeah these systems are inherently susceptible to rain and other weather atmospheric fade and so I think after deployment utilizing true measurements the data is there so it's just how do you incorporate it from a policy perspective. So before we close I want to see if there are questions out here folks in person if you don't mind going yeah there's a microphone behind your table there if you could use that because we have about three times as many people watching on the live stream and we want them to see you and hear you and please tell us who you are and my name is Roger Coachetti I am the author of a textbook published by Wiley the mobile satellite handbook that covers some of the related topics that were discussed today and have also authored a series of editorials for the Hill newspaper on Leo coordination issues most of which have dealt with the non-frequency aspects of it and the international aspects of it that's what I wanted to my questions on because within the fairly well manicured world of the Federal Communications Commission and American operators it's clear that there is a mutual understanding and a mutual benefit to voluntary coordination but just outside of that world is a lot of potential chaos which is probably my greatest concern my perspective is that the main driver is economics and cost and during the Reagan administration one of those geosatellites was $200 million lasted 10 years and was the size of a SUV and a Leo satellite would be $50 million and was the size of a motorcycle and would last 4 or 5 years today a Leo satellite pick your number but you could easily say it's the size of a toaster and cost between a million and $2 million and in 10 years it's probably going to be the size of a cell phone and cost a couple thousand dollars so if economics are driving things down then the potential for disruption I think significantly increases two areas in particular I was going to ask the panel to comment on one is that within the US government there are lots of agencies that have an interest in this the transportation department the space force at least a half a dozen intelligence agencies and the geospatial intelligence agencies the national science foundation and executive officer the president if I am an operator or an entrepreneur I might just go to some agency other than the FCC to sort of get my tailwinds at the international level it's much worse obviously we have no coordination at the international level except at the highest level of frequency but the potential for a Panama or Liberia to become a flag of convenience and okay so we skip the US market we'll not serve US because we can't use the frequencies in the US they haven't done everything by the rules so the issue that I'd like the panel to discuss is we have a fairly orderly world that has developed within domestic operators operating with the FCC what is the potential for that to come apart and my example would be hey if I was a Chinese entrepreneur and my whole philosophy was not if we cooperate we all benefit but my whole philosophy was move fast and break things then I might not look at the kind of condominium you're describing today as the future so please comment on interagency coordination within the US government and international coordination with other countries thank you okay not an easy one but can somebody take a stab at it go Julie I can start on the international side I've been going to the ITU since 1997 we thought the golden age of non-GIS stationary satellites was here but now it really is so there is an orderly process at the ITU of satellite registration coordination and notification and I find that countries take that quite seriously because it's a treaty obligation and when harmful interference occurs or if one brings into use and notifies the satellite network filing without having achieved coordination and there are concerns about that those concerns are elevated within the ITU process either at a world radio communication conference to the radio regulations board it's a case of harmful interference and the attention of the world is brought to bear on that and countries generally respond to that in a way that corrects whatever problem is existing I guess to echo that for one web had to go to China and coordinate with networks there and like was mentioned incentives exist not cause interference into others or that could reciprocally happen to you what was interesting at the time is all the networks that were sharing the band were geostationary and so what I've had less visibility to is if there are similar races going on in other networks and in other countries and at what speed these systems are being developed and at what level the desire to coordinate amongst them exists I'll add domestically Chairwoman Rosenwurzel has placed a high priority on enhancing the coordination between federal spectrum users and the FCC that is not just about getting federal spectrum putting it into commercial use it includes all of these elements of the federal commercial relationship and my anticipation is that as the MOU with the NTIA is implemented and developed and as Alan Davidson and Chairwoman Rosenwurzel continue to work on these issues that the question of coordination among the federal agencies on issues within the FCC's jurisdiction including the satellite allocations will become part of that regular coordination and dialogue I think the international way everything we talked about here has been domestic you're absolutely right there's another layer of like this is also all international Amazon and SpaceX happened to be the US licensees they're almost the only US licensees at this point for some of the reasons that you're identifying frankly but it shows how important it is that we get this right both with the interagency coordination but also that the FCC gets its rules right I also know that congress is looking at legislation to also try to give the congressional stamp and direction on how do we get the licensing in the United States to be appealing that people actually come back and on shore here and so because if you don't you're exactly right is what we've already been seeing is that operators if they think that the US is too cumbersome, too difficult they move, they just license overseas I thought Commissioner Simington raised actually a really interesting point which was that the US is essentially 50% of the world satellite market so most satellite operators and we know the ones that don't care about this satellite operators want to come back in the United States so it does actually put the US in a really good position if they can put in really smart rules that brings people back but also even if you license overseas you still need to get to make the economics work you probably need to get back into the US market so as long as the US is applying its rules in a smart way to the foreign operators there's a way that there can be a little what Commissioner Simington was saying it seems interesting is a little bit I can't remember the term he used but maybe a lead by example he had better term than I did but has the chance to be a leader by doing this right but it does really underscore how important it is that we do it right yeah, I think we're time for one more and we'll try to be efficient in our answers and get folks out of here soon Hi, Homan Hediati with CWA my question deviates a little from the panel topic but just very quickly I was I'm very interested to know what the FCC has done or is doing and what the industry is trying to do to address the carbon footprint of managing a network of let's say 70,000 lower orbiting satellites I understand the fiber to the home network has a much lower footprint and that's one of the reasons CWA has been advocating for this and as this industry is moving into universal adoption we're not just operating in areas that are unserved or underserved but competing with major providers how much of an issue is this going to be as we move towards addressing climate change issues thank you sounds like questions about the relative carbon footprint of this type of broadband I have seen the call for certain reports on this particularly pertaining to launching up the networks I have not seen those full reports in publication but I have heard folks starting to converse about it Amazon has made a climate pledge to be carbon neutral by 2040 and Project Kuiper is included in that pledge so overall across our businesses that is our commitment I guess the only thing I have to add since we're also a launch company is I think the I assumed I think that where you would look to see if what kind of carbon would be and what the studies have shown is the fuel you use for the launch matters a lot the type of fuel we use the refined fuel that we use it's been found to not have as much of a carbon footprint with other fuel could so I think that that might be the place to start looking when we get launch providers and maybe as satellite operators we should be looking to make sure that our satellites are using the cleanest possible fuel I think that's probably where it would come from okay great well thanks thanks everyone for coming in person this was our first not new americas I think new americas had one but first for wireless future for OTI our first in person really and seems to have gone well and we even have a larger than normal online audience as well since folks are trained to zoom in and can you join me please in thanking the panel and you can sign up on our homepage to get event notices for the future on any number of topics for all our programs thank you