Federal Communications Commission	FCC 26-26

STATEMENT OF 
CHAIRMAN BRENDAN CARR

Re: 	Modernizing Spectrum Sharing for Satellite Broadband, Report and Order, SB Docket No. 25-157 (April 30, 2026).

Americans today benefit from increased competition for their broadband dollars.  Wireless carriers are now competing for in-home subscribers.  Cable companies are competing for wireless customers.  And satellite is competing with both cable and wireless.  Today’s FCC decision will help supercharge that competition while expanding our country’s technological leadership.

Even though high-speed, next-generation satellite services provide essential connectivity across the country already, Americans are now about to see another big upgrade.  With today’s decision, consumers could now see a seven-fold increase in capacity for these high-speed, satellite offerings.

You see, the Commission has had the same technical restrictions on LEO satellite power levels going all the way back to the 1990s.  But those decades-old rules no longer reflect today’s offerings.  In fact, they are holding them back.  Modern satellite designs make it far easier to share spectrum than what yesterday’s regulations assume.  We can do much better.    

Today, low-Earth orbit satellite providers are scaling at a rapid pace.  Starlink alone now serves millions of Americans and millions more around the world.  Once dismissed as a niche offering, satellite broadband is a real—and growing—competitor in the connectivity marketplace.

That should inform how we approach power levels on satellite broadband.  Are our rules keeping up with this new reality?  Are they holding it back?  For years, our framework has relied on legacy constructs like EPFD.  Those rules were designed for a different generation of satellite systems, one defined by a small number of geostationary operators and primitive networks.

That is not the world we live in anymore.  Today’s systems move differently.  They scale differently.  They compete differently.  So, our rules should too.

Updating our approach—moving beyond outdated EPFD limits and toward more modern interference protections—also promotes competition.  It allows satellite providers to operate with greater parity alongside terrestrial broadband offerings.

And that competition matters.  Because when you increase competition, you increase consumer choice.  You drive investment. You push providers across technologies to do better.

The benefits will be felt most by the Americans who need them the most.  Rural communities.  Hard-to-reach areas.  Places where the business case for traditional deployment remains challenging.  For those Americans, high-speed satellite broadband is not theoretical.  It is tangible.  It is available now.  And it is improving rapidly.

This is also about American leadership.  U.S. companies are leading the world in next-generation satellite services.  We should have a regulatory framework that matches that energy, not one that slows it down.  And we are not going to leave Americans waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide while other countries debate whether they want the same types of next-gen systems operating in their parts of the world.  We are going to act now in the interests of the American people.  

	For their excellent work on this item, I thank Clay DeCell, Jennifer Gilsenan, Stephanie Neville, Sankar Persaud, and Jay Schwarz at the Space Bureau, and Mohammad Ahmad, Patrick Sun, and Aleks Yankelevich from the Office of Economics and Analytics.