With two satellites put into orbit in 2018, Hiber expects Hiber-3 and -4 to go up in the first half of 2020, company representatives told aides to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the other commissioners and International Bureau staff, per a parte posting Wednesday. The Dutch company urged approval of its market access request (see 1809110001), which has been pending 15 months, by February. Without it, it said the ability to attract investors to its satellite IoT business is impaired.
The FCC International Bureau approved HawkEye 360's application to deploy its space-based mapping constellation of up to 80 low earth orbit satellites. The bureau said the number of simultaneously operational HawkEye earth observation satellites can't exceed 15, but that number doesn't include its three Pathfinder satellites launched in 2018 under experimental authorizations, it said Wednesday in the 15-year license approval. The constellation will operate at a nominal 575 km orbit, it said.
Amazon's simulations of the operational environment for non-geostationary orbit processing round participants shows its proposed Kuiper broadband mega constellation won't materially affect the Ka-band NGSO environment as long as operators coordinate in good faith. So said a posting Wednesday recapping Amazon representatives meeting with FCC International Bureau officials. Amazon said it would initiate good faith coordination with NGSO operators, urging OK'ing its application.
Having launched its MEV-1 mission extension vehicle in October, Northrop Grumman subsidiary SpaceLogistics is now eyeing a second mission, asking the FCC International Bureau Tuesday for authority to launch and operate MEV-2. It said it contracted with Intelsat for a life extension mission for Intelsat 1002. It said MEV-1 and -2 are nearly identical in design. It said MEV-2 has a 15-year design life and enough fuel for more than 15 years of operations while docked with a typical geostationary communications satellite.
NTIA not recommending the FCC approve Ligado license modifications (see 1912090011) "should be reexamined immediately," said former NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai posted Tuesday in docket 11-109. "This 35 MHz is not just one spectrum option to advance 5G [but] is absolutely critical to a viable U.S. 5G deployment strategy." Goldin said there are potentially Commerce Department or NTIA staff "internal agendas" that conflict with federal 5G priorities, noting Pai's Senate testimony in June (see 1906120076). Goldin said adopting a 1 dB noise floor metric for harmful interference would be "unprecedented" and force the FCC to revoke adjacent spectrum that has been deployed. NTIA didn't comment Wednesday.
Altran, AT&T, EchoStar, Eutelsat, GoGo, Hughes, Inmarsat, Intelsat, Ligado, Nokia, SES and Sprint are among the companies making up the Non-Terrestrial Networks 5G Integration Working Group announced Tuesday by ATIS. It said the group will focus on standards for non-terrestrial 5G networks, developing and coordinating technical positions. ATIS President Susan Miller said the WG will help ensure satellite systems are integrated into 5G. ATIS said the Intelsat chairs the group. It said the WG will develop technical proposals aligned between satellite and terrestrial 3rd Generation Partnership Project ecosystem parties, with the overall goal an end-to-end standard by Q3.
Amazon is now a member of Global VSAT Forum, and Julie Zoller, regulatory affairs head for its Project Kuiper, was elected to a two-year board term (see personals section, this issue), GVF said Monday.
Hughes and UAE satellite operator Al Yah Satellite began a joint venture to provide satellite broadband service in Brazil, Hughes said Friday. Hughes said it owns 80 percent of the JV, Al Yah the rest, and it will employ Hughes' Hughes 65 West and Hughes 63 West and the Al Yah 3 satellites.
LeoSat's seeming shutdown should be seen as a minor setback for the small-satellite market, since the company was targeting a specific niche of high-throughput connectivity for corporate customers and that carried a particularly high price tag and a longer time for return on investment, Frost & Sullivan analyst Arun Sampathkumar blogged Thursday. The market likely can support many thousands of smallsats, and mega constellation operators with cheaper business models will find investors, he said. LeoSat's U.S. market access was revoked in September (see 1911140004). It didn't comment Friday.
The 1 dB increase in noise floor is the international definition of harmful interference and can be an objective and predictable metric for protecting satellite-based radio navigation like GPS from harmful interference, GPS Innovation Alliance Executive Director David Grossman blogged Thursday. He said critics press for other metrics, like use of key performance indicators (KPI), but those are calculated further downstream in the receiver when harmful interference may already have occurred. Evaluating KPIs across legions of devices, operational scenarios and measurements "is logistically and administratively impossible," he said.