TAMPA, Fla. — It will become increasingly challenging to protect national interests during treaty-level talks over how radio waves should be allocated for satellite connectivity, according to the ambassador who led U.S. efforts at the 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-23).
“We’re going to see, I think, a lot more satellite-related issues,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Steve Lang said during a conference Jan. 22 in Washington, “as we have … more constellations going up, and those issues are going to continue to get more challenging.”
Lang led a U.S. delegation of nearly 200 people at WRC-23 in Dubai, an event the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU) holds every four years to review and revise rules for the use of radio waves, including by satellites across different orbits.
WRC-23 ended Dec. 15 after four weeks of talks with a mixed bag of resolutions for the space industry.
“We have made it a priority to create the environment that will enable new non-geostationary orbit systems (NGSO) or low Earth orbit systems like Starlink or Amazon’s Kuiper system that will provide internet broadband connectivity,” Lang said, “especially for remote areas with low latency.”
However, “we saw a lot of resistance,” he added, “and in fact, I would even say, an unfortunate bias against these NGSO systems” across WRC-23 talks.
SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon are based in the United States, which Lang said is leading the development of NGSO systems, and so some of the resistance is down to other countries seeking to advance their technological leadership and national security interests.
But “some countries were concerned about the impact that large megaconstellations could have on radio astronomy,” he added “or they were concerned about the future availability of orbital or spectrum resources for systems that we’re not thinking of yet.”
WRC-23 approved putting NGSO…
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