The FCC Lets Satellite Innovation Breathe

A pending FCC vote to modernize spectrum-sharing rules would replace a decades-old regime built for a different era. At stake are the Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) limits—technical constraints drafted in the 1990s to manage how non-geostationary orbit satellites interact with legacy geostationary systems. Those rules assumed technologies that no longer exist. Today, they function less as safeguards than as a brake on capacity, especially for low-Earth-orbit constellations delivering high-speed, low-latency broadband to underserved areas.