10th Floor Hears Rival Arguments on NGSO Protection Metric

Satellite operators are lobbying the FCC heavily about protecting earlier-round non-geostationary orbit systems from later-round NGSOs, but the industry is split on metrics. Meeting with the offices of all five FCC commissioners, Intelsat reiterated its backing for a 3% threshold in throughput degradation for long-term interference protection and a sliding-scale in degradation for short-term protection, according to a post in docket 21-456 Monday. It said Intelsat opposes a 0.4% flat degradation. Amazon's Kuiper said that there's industry consensus on numerous issues and that the agency should reject O3b's "bespoke and complicated formula" for calculating short-term interference threshold and instead go with the absolute short-term threshold within the range suggested by it -- 0.1% -- and SpaceX -- 0.4%. Kuiper said O3b's "overly protective" short-term threshold incentivizes incumbents to make unreasonable coordination demands and use its protections against new competitors. In meetings with the offices of the four regular commissioners, O3b said the 0.4% absolute change would hurt NGSO customers and competition. That approach, O3b added, would let later-round systems put higher levels of short-term interference on incumbents than a system in the same processing round could, under current processing round rules. O3b reiterated its call for a Further NPRM seeking input on the different short-term interference metric proposals (see 2410150045).