Intelsat Pitch to Sell U.S. Airwaves Sparks Fight Over Spoils
Along with two other European companies, it wants to auction bandwidth licensed from the U.S. government, but some lawmakers say the Treasury should keep the proceeds.
The satellite earth station operated by the technology company Intelsat, near Fuchsstadt, Germany.
Photographer: Nicolas Armer/dpa/ZUMA
Television shows reach viewers in the U.S. via a network of satellites that relay everything from NBC’s Today show to Fox’s Thursday Night Football. Local stations and cable outlets in turn send those shows to more than 120 million American households. Now the two giants of the TV-beaming business—Intelsat SA and SES SA, both based in Luxembourg—along with Ottawa-based Telesat want to sell access rights to some of the frequencies they use. These frequencies are part of a swath known as the C-band, and they’re good for more than just transmitting sitcoms and soaps. Whoever gets access to them will be in the pole position in the race to capture the 5G market.
Different frequency ranges (otherwise known as bandwidths or spectrum) have different characteristics: Higher frequencies can carry more information but don’t travel very far, whereas low frequencies travel farther but don’t carry much data. The C-band airwaves are in a Goldilocks range: just right to carry the amounts of data required for 5G over a long enough distance that building out a network wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive.