NTIA responds to FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on satellites and spectrum use

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration commented in response to the Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing federal earth stations, launch spectrum, and operation of a new federal environmental sensing satellite. These issues are connected by the principle that the responsibilities of the FCC and NTIA to manage our respective spheres of spectrum use require continued adjustment to reflect the realities of their interdependence. Here, it means:

1. Federal use of non-federal commercial satellite services should be recognized to have the same rights to protection as other users of those services;
2. Expectations to accommodate new non-federal use of federal launch spectrum must be tempered by recognition of the critical and growing uses of that spectrum by federal agencies in bands that are already congested, such that non-federal users should be encouraged to develop alternatives, particularly for in-orbit and payload communications; and
3. Recognition of the long-standing plans for the launch of Argos-4 as a federal satellite.