C-Band Plan Won't Hurt Broadcast Distribution, Erode Satellite Rights, Intelsat Says

Shared mobile/satellite use of the C band under the model being pitched by Intelsat and Intel (see 1710040013) wouldn't compromise certainty, reliability or quality of broadcasting of media content to cable headends, Intelsat Senior Vice President-Sales and Marketing Kurt Riegelman blogged. He said its proposal would have satellite remain co-primary in the 3700-4200 MHz band. Riegelman said avoiding co-frequency use in certain areas but giving satellite the ability to use all 500 MHz elsewhere would preserve quality of programming distribution throughout the band. In a separate blog Tuesday, Intelsat Vice President-Spectrum Strategy Hazem Moakkit said the Intelsat/Intel plan doesn't undermine satellite rights to the C band since trying to apply that approach in other nations "is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole." He said C-band use globally generally is fragmented across numerous operators, unlike in the U.S., so the Intelsat/Intel approach is inherently impractical in other regions. Moakkit called "risk of contagion ... quite low" given the rest of the world uses the 3.4-3.6 GHz band for mobile while 3.4-3.7 GHz in the U.S. is for federal use and citizens broadband radio service. Since the C-band is a capacity band, its 5G use would only be in densely populated areas, he said. He said much of Africa, Asia and South America uses the C-band for a wide variety of services, so joint use isn't viable there.