By Foo Yun Chee<\/p>\n
BRUSSELS, May 27 (Reuters) – Non-European satellite operators such as Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s low-earth-orbit satellite business \u200ccan bid for European mobile satellite spectrum next year but \u200cthe bulk of the frequencies will be reserved for European businesses, the European Commission \u200bsaid on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The move by the EU executive aims to allow new operators into the market following next year’s expiry of licenses currently held by U.S. companies Viasat and EchoStar.<\/p>\n
The new allocation system comes amid \u200ca push by EU \u2060to boost the bloc’s tech sovereignty by promoting European tech players, driven by concerns over China’s technological rise \u2060and the dominance of U.S. tech giants at a time of transatlantic tensions.<\/p>\n
The 2 GHz frequency band is ideal for direct-to-direct services allowing users \u200bto bypass \u200btelecoms providers and for providing \u200bcritical communication capabilities and also \u200censure access to high-speed internet in remote areas.<\/p>\n
“More than ever, high-capacity widely available satellite connectivity is essential to strengthen the resilience of the EU’s communication networks,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“Satellite connectivity is also crucial for our governmental services and Europe’s critical \u200ccommunications,” she said.<\/p>\n
The new allocation system \u200bwill reserve one third of the mobile \u200bsatellite spectrum for governmental use \u200bsuch as security and military, which will be \u200cprovided by an EU operator that \u200bwill integrate the \u200bcapability with the EU’s IRIS2 multi-orbit array of 290 satellites, the Commission said.<\/p>\n
IRIS2 is Europe’s response to Starlink.<\/p>\n
Two thirds of the \u200bspectrum will be divided \u200cequally between EU and non-EU operators for commercial use, the \u200bEU executive said, confirming a Reuters report.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Foo \u200bYun Chee, editing by Inti Landauro)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS, May 27 (Reuters) – Non-European satellite operators such as Elon Musk’s Starlink and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2385],"tags":[3598,256,32041,31544,16761,3309],"class_list":["post-53785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-european-commission","tag-elon-musk","tag-european-commission","tag-satellite-business","tag-satellite-connectivity","tag-satellite-operators","tag-spectrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}