The proposal expected to be announced on Wednesday would leave Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper able to bid only for the remaining third of the bloc’s 2 GHz mobile-satellite band.
The European Commission is preparing to reserve two-thirds of the bloc’s future mobile-satellite-services spectrum for European operators, leaving Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and other non-EU companies able to bid only for the remaining third, according to a Reuters report on Tuesday citing people familiar with the proposal.
Details are expected to be confirmed at a meeting of commissioners in Brussels on Wednesday, though the people cautioned that the structure could still shift before formal announcement.
The spectrum in question is the 2 GHz mobile-satellite-services (MSS) band, the 30 MHz pair of frequencies between 1980-2010 MHz and 2170-2200 MHz that allows mobile devices and vehicles to keep a connection in regions where terrestrial mobile networks cannot reach. The current licences, granted in 2009 to Inmarsat (now Viasat) and Solaris (now EchoStar), expire in May 2027.
The post-2027 allocation is what Wednesday’s decision concerns. EU member states, working through the Commission, control the band on a harmonised basis, which is what makes a single bloc-wide reservation possible at all.
