In an April 4th public note the FCC’s recently appointed chair Brendan Carr listed a number of tasks on his desk for action, not least the FCC’s current ‘foreign ownership rules’.He said: “Over the years, those regulations have increased almost as quickly as interest in the Heard and McDonald Islands. But in many cases, the FCC never codified those foreign ownership regulations in our rules. Not very efficient! Unwritten rules only make it harder for entities to understand and navigate our requirements, they risk inconsistent outcomes, and they can needlessly raise costs. We therefore initiate a proceeding that looks at codifying our requirements while asking about eliminating any needless ones.”Commissioner Carr also addressed space-based spectrum saying that at its next ‘Final Frontiers’ meeting the FCC seeks to unleash even faster and more robust broadband services from space.“Specifically, we will look to update our rules in the frequencies commonly known by satellite aficionados (read: nerds) as the Ka- and Ku- bands. These are workhorse satellite frequencies that support the next generation of mega constellations in low-Earth orbit. Unfortunately, new innovations have been held back by FCC technical rules that we adopted thirty years ago. Power limits developed in the 1990s to protect geostationary satellite systems from interference continue to restrict the performance of non-geostationary satellite systems, even though advancements in sharing technology arguably make the rules of the past no longer necessary. To fuel the growth of these new satellite broadband services, the Commission will vote to take a fresh look at the decades-old spectrum sharing regime between geostationary and non-geostationary satellite systems in these spectrum bands. Nerds and non-nerds alike may soon rejoice as they get even better service from space,” he wrote.
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