AEI Post Highlights Report by ICLE-New America LEO Policy Working Group
A post for the American Enterprise Institute’s AEIdeas blog highlights a new report from the bipartisan working group convened by ICLE and the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project.
With higher speeds and lower latency than earlier generations of satellites, LEOs have proven useful for residential broadband in rural areas, backhaul for mobile carriers, precision agriculture, disaster recovery, and even enterprise-scale Internet of Things applications. In just a few years, the number of LEO satellites in orbit has increased tenfold. SpaceX’s Starlink, which began formally offering satellite broadband in 2021, now serves more than seven million subscribers across 150 countries. Between June and August of this year alone, the service added a million new users. That kind of growth is hard to ignore, and policymakers are scrambling to keep up.
To help bridge that gap, the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project and the International Center for Law & Economics convened a bipartisan working group of experts—industry leaders, regulators, economists, and academics (myself included)—to map out the policy challenges facing LEO systems. Our final report, to be the centerpiece of a November 13 symposium featuring Jay Schwarz, chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s Space Bureau, aims to help federal and state leaders better understand this fast-changing landscape.
Three key areas emerged as priorities: spectrum access, competition, and inclusion in broadband deployment policy. LEO satellites are pushing the boundaries of all three.
Read the full piece here.