Broadband Satellite Companies Challenging Earth Station Restrictions

O3b, OneWeb, SES and ViaSat -- said there's little basis for thinking collocation of 28 GHz FSS earth stations would be practical with terrestrial antennas. They said that earth stations and terrestrial antennas point in different directions, making vertical collocation impossible. They said FSS earth stations are far less dense than terrestrial transmitters, meaning there's little business incentive for third-party site developers that take care of terrestrial transmitter issues like real estate or pole attachment rights and infrastructure build out. They also said grouping FSS earth stations in limited locations per upper microwave flexible use (UMFU) license area would require power flux-density limits at each collocation site, and putting those on retroactively would require operational and physical modifications to the earth station operations and would end up limiting FSS deployment to one 28 Hz band antenna per earth station location, defeating the purpose of setting up a single location for deployment of multiple 28 GHz band antennas. The satellite companies said different site infrastructure and site size needs would make the idea of clustering multiple FSS earth station licensees in particular spots unworkable. They also said UMFU deployment "would be unlikely at best," particularly in low population density areas, and FSS operators should be allowed to choose where to put earth stations based on system design and technical characteristics, to modify and add transmitters to those earth stations on a co-primary basis and to deploy those facilities on a five-year basis after licensing. In a separate ex parte filing Friday in the docket, O3b recapped meetings of CEO Steve Collar and Vice President-Regulatory Affairs Suzanne Malloy with Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, Mike O'Rielly and Ajit Pai, along with Chairman Tom Wheeler's front-line staff, to discuss FSS sharing in the 28 GHz band. O3b said exclusive geographic licenses are inappropriate for the 28 GHz band, and sharing with terrestrial use is feasible since FSS needs small areas for earth station uplinks, and terrestrial use "will also be confined to relatively small geographic areas." O3b also said it needs "reasonable access" to build new earth stations beyond one site per county, but at customer premises. It said its satellites need protection from terrestrial uplink interference, and the threshold when aggregate terrestrial emissions would cause interference is now a question mark, so the FCC needs to act to ensure emissions are below that threshold and can be reduced if the threshold is passed. O3b urged the agency to push for industry consensus on FSS/UMFU sharing and "not rush to adopt technical sharing parameters that do not have broad consensus among UMFU proponents and satellite operators."