There's plenty of spectrum available. For purchase. Contact T-Mobile or Verizon.
It hasn't ever really been an issue with any spectrum that they've bought in the past, and it has only ever been a concern with mmWave spectrum, because the costs of coverage are much higher than were ever anticipated with their tiny effective ranges. Anything below 3GHz seems to get built out and used extremely quickly.
LOL, DISH squatted nationwode spectrum for years and it wasn't until the tmo/sprint merger that they did more than build a single tower in Colorado. I don't think I've ever seen the FCC seriously enforce the buildout requirements since any license holder can say 'but its hard we need more time/money'
The issue you have to surmount is this reduces the value of the licenses in the short run. Which means less cash for the seller (the public) now versus a recurring productive asset.
The useless response is to decry hyperbolic discounting. A productive response would think through how to design the auction such that the public would prefer to have the productive, recurring stream of revenue versus some shiny thing today.
Well, that assumes the public isn't really benefiting from the products and services that can actually take advantage of that spectrum. Making less in license fees is probably a good trade-off if your phone is faster or you get interesting and affordable satellite services.
I don’t think either spectrum will be feasible for direct to cell satellite communication in the short term, though.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/09/24/live-coverage-spacex-t...
As those are the easy to license frequencies globally. Not to mention, 17GHz is far away from 12GHz and 14.5GHz, so the antenna complexity also goes up. And the teardowns of civilian Starlink terminals have not shown dual band antennas so far.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-22-63A1.pdf
It's been in the works since 2007 to allow direct space-earth communication in that band, with the big push to allow much wider service coming in 2020.
Yet another reminder. What happens when you have organizations that aren't beholden to outside pressure
This is a silly line to draw. In an existential conflict, the military gets what it wants. Commandeering spectrum would be a basic part of war powers; we’ve done it before and would do it again for stakes much lower than an invasion of the homeland [1].
So the practical value of such a proposal is in messaging. Given the threshold wouldn’t have covered the attacks on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or even a nuclear first strike, the only thing messaged is unreasonableness.
Put another way, were I a lobbyist for the military to the Congress, I would want someone to propose this language. Because it lets one brand, with a laugh, the entire effort as being as ridiculous as the caveat.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-confiscated-half-b...
I like this narrower approach the FCC is taking
Starlink user terminals are half duplex (Tx and Rx at different times) and so could easily support 17GHz DL in a new version. But the satellite is necessarily full duplex (propagation delays differ across users so sat needs to Tx and Rx at overlapping times). Starlink's satellites would seem unlikely to be able to handle their own tx self desense (self jamming) if they used these new frequencies.
Probably a win for Kuiper, but not Starlink.
Not surprising given the current administration opposes some of Starlink's "questionable" objectives. https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1eu994l/mus...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2811927/trump-propos... It's now part of the official GOP platform (number 8).
The GOP wants an interceptor. Musk probably agrees with that. It foes not follow SpaceX is developing an interceptor. (None of their current kit is interceptor stuff.)
This makes no sense—a plane change in LEO takes about as much energy as a launch to LEO. What you gain in proximity you lose in propellant. Interceptors on Starlink is nukes on the Moon.
LEO constellations make sense for sensing—it’s harder to plausibly deniably take out a ring of satellites than an early-warning radar. But not for interception.
> Castelion
SpaceX’s work on rapid turnaround and hypersonic reëntry absolutely has implications for missile intercept. But they’re contributors to the aim and not pursuing it themselves.
The point of hypersonic weapons is they can fly under the radar, literally, and manoeuvre. (I should say goal, because there is no stealthy hypersonic missile yet due to heat signatures.)
The hypersonic flight regime starts at Mach 5, or about 3,800 mph. LEO is at 17,000 mph. To leave LEO quickly, you need to cancel out a lot of that velocity, and that’s just to deörbit, I’m ignoring that you’ve gone from needing to pre-cool your engine to having to pre-cool your entire interceptor because you’re manoeuvring through the atmosphere with orbital energy.
Orbiting missile defence doesn’t make sense. It’s worse than launching from the ground for space intercept. It’s worse than launching from atmosphere for boost or terminal-phase intercept. If you look at what Griffin is doing versus saying, you’ll notice Castelion is building missiles designed to be launched from conventional platforms.
Even then, he doesn’t really make a case for space-based interception. He just says it isn’t as expensive as it was in the 80s, which is true. He also ends by talking about sensing from orbit which, as I said earlier, makes sense.
I never heard of this and searching for this term brought me back here. Any more info?
How is that evidence that Starshield is supposed to be a space-based ICBM interceptor network?
The current administration is pouring billions into SpaceX sats (Starshield, custom Starlink-like secretive sats for US gov). Also, your link is presenting obvious bullshit from AI chatbot as a fact.
Makes sense now