Starlink Wins Major FCC Fight That Could Have Ended Its U.S. Service

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SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service won a major fight at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier today when the FCC passed new rules for the 12GHz band. Starlink uses this band for its user terminals, and petitioners such as DISH Corporation and RS Access, LLC had requested the Commission to open up a portion of this band for two-way terrestrial use. SpaceX had objected to this, claiming that this would create interference with the Starlink dishes. At the same time, the latter argued that recent technological advancements would lead to little or no interference.

The FCC's order today follows a draft order released earlier which had proposed an equitable solution that would preserve the portion used by Starlink and allocate a new spectrum for the terrestrial rules. After years of back and forth between the parties, RS Access LLC and Starlink have welcomed the decision.

The fight between the companies was a rather interesting one as it involved a petition filed by Dish in 2016 asking the FCC to restrict the non-geostationary satellite operators' (NGSO) access to the 12GHz band. Dish had argued that terrestrial and other users could not coexist in the spectrum with the satellite services, and therefore the latter should be kicked out.

However, this filing, which came more than a decade after the FCC had initially granted the spectrum's use to multichannel video and data distribution services (MVDDS) providers, was made two years before SpaceX was granted use of the 12GHz ban for Starlink.

As SpaceX, Dish and RS Access (which aims to use the ban for MVDDS coverage) each