The waiver was the policy. Thursday is the paperwork.

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

Tomorrow, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on what it calls a generational shift in satellite spectrum policy. The Commission is right that the shift is generational. It is wrong about when and where the shift took place.

The vote on Thursday, April 30, retires the 1990s Equivalent Power Flux Density framework and replaces it with a performance-based coordination regime. The FCC projects $2 billion in economic benefit and up to a sevenfold gain in low Earth orbit broadband capacity. The framework being retired is genuinely obsolete. Its interference math predates phased-array antennas, modern beam steering, and adaptive coding by a generation. None of that is in dispute.

What should be in dispute is the sequence.

I argued in March that the Commission faced a choice between enforcing the existing rules and preserving LEO competition. Thursday is the answer. The way the answer was sequenced is what this piece is about.

SpaceX received its EPFD waiver on January 9, 2026, a time-limited authorization valid for 18 to 24 months that allowed the company to exceed existing power limits while the rulemaking proceeded. Amazon Kuiper, which had requested its own 24-month deployment-milestone extension in late January, got a parallel waiver in February. By the time the Commission votes Thursday to formalize the new framework, SpaceX will have been operating under the relaxed limits for nearly four months. Kuiper for two to three.

Every other NGSO operator enters the new framework on Thursday at zero. Telesat Lightspeed has not begun deployment in earnest. Only its LEO 3 demonstrator is on-orbit, with pathfinder launches now pushed to December. AST SpaceMobile holds a fresh 248-satellite authorization for a constellation it has yet to build, and is still reeling from the loss of BlueBird 7 to a New Glenn upper-stage anomaly last week. China’s Guowang is 168 satellites into a 13,000-target constellation, well behind its own 2026 plan amid a domestic launch shortage. SpaceX, with more than 10,000 satellites in orbit and roughly 65 percent of all active satellites worldwide, enters Thursday with three months of operational data the framework will codify.

That sequence matters because the structural argument the FCC is making does not fully account for it. The new framework leans on “good-faith coordination” between NGSO and GSO operators, with a 3 percent throughput-degradation backstop and a 0.1 percent link-unavailability floor protecting GSO services. The numbers are precise. The negotiating tables are not. When a regional GSO operator sits across from one running 10,000 satellites with three months of waiver-era data, and when regulators have already publicly signaled which way the policy is running, coordination is not a process. It is a price-discovery exercise dictated by the larger party. The mechanism is mundane: the operator that has been measuring under the relaxed limits brings the only operational interference data the rule will treat as evidentiary; the operator that has not has nothing comparable to file in response.

This week’s clearest illustration of the asymmetry lifted off from Kennedy on Wednesday morning. Viasat’s ViaSat-3 F3, the third and final spacecraft in the company’s three-satellite geostationary build, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the rocket’s first flight in 18 months, after two earlier scrubs. The satellite is designed to add more than a terabit of throughput across Asia-Pacific. It will arrive at its orbital slot in late summer, well after Thursday’s vote restructures the regulatory environment around higher-power LEO operations in the same frequency bands it depends on. Viasat formally opposed the EPFD overhaul. SES and DirecTV filed similar objections in March. The GSO operators’ position was not that the framework was untouchable; it was that the existing limits should be recalibrated for modern hardware, not retired wholesale. The order rejects that distinction. Their filings will be cited in the dissent record and overridden. By the time ViaSat-3 F3 enters commercial service, the rules of the game will have changed mid-launch.

The strongest case for the FCC’s approach is the one CSIS and the agency’s own technical record have been making for months. The existing EPFD framework punishes efficient spectrum use across the board, GSO operators included. Static interference shields disincentivize incumbents from improving their own interference tolerance. NGSO operators are barred from using assigned spectrum as efficiently as modern hardware allows. The policy is structurally lose-lose, regardless of who benefits from its replacement. That argument is correct. Incumbent protection is not a permanent subsidy.

But “the rules are bad” and “the timing systematically advantages incumbents” are not mutually exclusive. The FCC could have insisted that all NGSO operators move under the new framework simultaneously, with the rulemaking serving as a single trigger. Instead, the agency granted individually negotiated waivers to the two operators most able to exploit the relaxed limits, allowed those waivers to run for months, and is now codifying the framework that retroactively legitimizes them. That is not deregulation. It is staged ratification.

Smaller LEO entrants live in the consequences in a specific way. Telesat Lightspeed, AST SpaceMobile, and Guowang are not late to the framework because they were slow. They are late because no one waived their power limits. The window in which the new rules were calibrated against operational data was a window only two operators were inside. By the time the others reach orbit at scale, the coordination thresholds, the interference templates, and the bilateral precedents will already have been set against measurements taken from a 10,000-satellite competitor running at relaxed limits. The “good-faith coordination” mechanism will determine, in practice, how much spectrum each of them can use, on what terms, and at what price. The terms are being set by the operator that already moved.

The verdict is not that Thursday’s vote should not happen. The 1990s rules need to go. The FCC will say Thursday is the day American satellite broadband was unleashed. The accurate description is narrower and more important: April 30 is the day the existing market structure is formally written into the regulatory architecture. The capacity gains are real. The competition gains are not. Industry should know which of those things happened, even if the press release does not.

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About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.