Satellite

For stock investors, a new risk is orbiting the satellite market: By trying to preserve competition, antitrust regulators could end up placing even more power in the hands of a privately-owned behemoth—Elon Musk‘s Starlink. California’s Viasat announced a $7.3 billion takeover of British satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat in late 2021, making it a centerpiece in the long-awaited consolidation of the satellite market. Yet, despite the deal being cleared by the U.K.

There’s one bit of the future that Elon Musk has built and isn’t interested in using: A potential power that researchers have identified in his Starlink satellite system. For the past two years, Todd Humphreys, an Army-funded researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, and a team of researchers reverse-engineered signals sent from thousands of Starlink internet satellites in low Earth orbit to ground-based receivers, finding that the constellation could form a precise navigation sy

Elon Musk’s aerospace business SpaceX has ordered one of the larger advertising packages available from Twitter, the social media business he just acquired in a $44 billion deal and where he is now serving as CEO.

It’s been a busy few weeks with announcements from the satellite broadband industry.

SpaceX quietly revealed the plan to cap residential Starlink service by publishing a “Fair Use Policy” for the popular satellite internet service. The document says residential Starlink subscribers in the US will receive 1TB worth of “Priority Access” per month.

We believe the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program provides the best possible chance to bring robust, reliable all-fiber broadband service to the many millions of unserved and underserved locations throughout the country. That said, we understand that National Telecommunications and Information Administration may be considering permitting States and Territories to award grants to applicants using other, less capable transmission technologies where the costs to deploy networks can be extremely high.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is planning to reorganize the FCC to better support the needs of the growing satellite industry, promote long-term technical capacity at the agency, and navigate 21st global communications policy. Under this plan, Chairwoman Rosenworcel will work to reorganize the FCC’s International Bureau into a new Space Bureau and a standalone Office of International Affairs.

As a Commissioner focused so deeply on the digital divide, I’m especially thrilled about what a golden era in commercial space could mean for broadband. New satellite broadband systems promise more choice and better performance for many Americans, including those who live, work, and travel in some the toughest-to-serve places. Making space innovation sustainable is a multidimensional problem. 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.

In 2020, the Federal Communications Commission committed to providing Starlink, a satellite internet network operating in 40 countries by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, with $885.5 million to expand broadband in unserved rural areas of the United States. But in August 2022, the FCC announced with almost no explanation that Starlink would receive nothing.