Though one National Public Safety Telecommunications Council representative told Gogo he no longer had concerns about a Gogo Business Aviation waiver (see 2110130063), "NPSTC's position of concern has not changed," Spectrum Committee Chairman Don Root emailed us Wednesday. Root said NPSTC's 16 organizations representing public safety communications interests haven't reached consensus on whether there's no longer a concern. Gogo said Thursday it "remains eager ‘to satisfactorily resolve any concerns raised by NPSTC, Motorola or other stakeholders" about its waiver request and it "will continue to reach out and address any public safety concerns raised by any party or representative.”
Matt Daneman
Matt Daneman, Senior Editor, covers pay TV, cable broadband, satellite, and video issues and the Federal Communications Commission for Communications Daily. He joined Warren Communications in 2015 after more than 15 years at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where he covered business among other issues. He also was a correspondent for USA Today. You can follow Daneman on Twitter: @mdaneman
Data surpassed video as a revenue stream for commercial satellite operators in 2020, and data revenue should grow sizably over the rest of this decade while video shrinks, said Northern Sky Research analyst Lluc Palerm on an NSR webinar Thursday. He said COVID-19 affected some satcom service areas such as aviation connectivity, but consumer broadband and fixed data continue growing. Business areas affected by the pandemic should recover by 2023, said Palerm. He said tens of Tbps of capacity is coming from low earth orbit constellations, but a lot will be over areas with no addressable markets, like oceans, meaning a 5% to 10% utilization rate for non-geostationary orbit high throughput satellite data by 2030. Asked about the possibility of a communications satellite bubble that could burst, Palerm said 2021 is very different from the downturn 20 years ago. He said the telecom industry is more open to adopting satellites into telco networks. Whether low earth orbit constellations will be financially successful remains to be seen, “but for sure they are going to launch," he said.
Wi-Fi 6, now about 2 years old, should start getting wide adoption among ISPs starting by year's end, with it becoming relatively commonplace in households toward Q2, said Patrick Moreno, Zyxel Communications product marketing manager, during a webinar Thursday. He said many providers remain "in the discovery phase" about Wi-Fi 6. He said the latest generation of Wi-Fi has speeds 30% to 40% faster than Wi-Fi 5 and increased capacity for more connected devices, plus lower latency for time-sensitive applications. He said Wi-Fi 6 routers will be backward compatible for Wi-Fi 4 and 5. A variation -- Wi-Fi 6E, which came out earlier this year -- adds the 6 GHz band, which will help alleviate congestion in the crowded 2.4 GHz band and the starting-to-crowd 5 GHz band, Moreno said. He said 6E gateways and extenders are in development.
Cable operators need to be vigilant about threats of being overbuilt as tens of billions of federal dollars are poised to be directed toward broadband projects in coming years, said cable lawyer Tom Cohen of Kelley Drye Wednesday at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2021. The broadband infrastructure funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, if passed, would take a year or so to be implemented and could start flowing in 2022 (see 2110120038), he said. That could give incumbents time to get ahead of competition and also think about what unserved areas nearby that could be grabbed, he said.
Many commercial space operators are designing their systems with cybersecurity protection in mind, but "there are still gaps we have to address," said Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Don Graves Wednesday during a Commerce/Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity symposium. Cyberattacks are one of the easiest ways to disrupt or manipulate satellites, and operators need to evaluate their systems using the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework, he said. Bob Kolasky, head of DHS' National Risk Management Center, said federal government action on President Joe Biden's cybersecurity executive order issued earlier this year (see 2105130065) could have a cascading effect on private sector supply chains.
5G remains a theoretical competitive threat to cable, not an actual one, though additional midband and millimeter wave spectrum and new entrants like Dish Network could change that, cable operators and allies said Tuesday at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2021.
Municipal interests are on one side, telecom interests largely on the other, over a Mediacom petition seeking FCC preemption of a deal between Google Fiber and West Des Moines, Iowa, on constructing a conduit network to provide broadband in unserved parts of town, per comments last week in docket 21-217.
The astronomy universe said countries licensing or doing regulatory assessments of satellite constellations should require constellation operators to coordinate with astronomy interests, and their environmental governance and regulation include the night sky and space. Those were among working group recommendations coming Thursday out of the Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society, organized by the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and Spain. A report on the conference is to go to the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in February.
While the E band isn't widely used by commercial satellite communications today, satcom operators are urging the FCC to ensure future access and many see it the spectrum becoming contested space between satellite and wireless interests. Dennis Roberson of Roberson and Associates said there "inevitably" will be a fight over satellite vs. terrestrial use as there's always demand for exclusivity.
Intelsat slightly raised its estimated C-band Phase I clearing expenses, while SES, Telesat and Embratel said they are done with Phase I or on the cusp, in FCC docket 18-122 accelerated clearing transition plan updates last week. Intelsat said the $10 million increase, to $1.76 billion, was driven by higher customer migration and compression expenses and telemetry, tracking and control/gateway relocation and ground system grooming plan costs. Its update increases the estimate of cable headends and cable antennas receiving Intelsat customer transmission and thus will need some retuning or repainting in the migration plan. Its estimate was 460 headends and 1,800 antennas; now it's 2,500 total headends and 10,000 antennas. SES said it's transitioned all services out of the 3700-3820 MHz band exclusive to the contiguous U.S. Estimated costs are unchanged. Telesat expects to complete the 3.7-4 GHz clearing in one swoop this week, instead of in two phases. Embratel said the transponder used for C-band services on its Star One C1 satellite is no longer operational and the satellite itself will cease operations by Oct. 9 and be deorbited.