TPRC 2024: The 52nd Research Conference on Communications, Information and Inter

Link to paper

Abstract:
While there has been an explosive growth in investment and innovation in satellite technology throughout the last decade, earth stations, the terminals that establish terrestrial communication with satellites, have gone largely unnoticed despite their critical role.

Commercial earth stations are broadly divided between gateways and user terminals. Gateways, also known as teleports, are typically larger, stationary antennas connected to fiber, and are licensed on an individual basis. User terminals are relatively smaller antennas, which can be fixed or mobile, and are often granted on a blanket license basis. As of early March 2024, there were 9,665 current and 1,465 pending applications. C-band downlink with 28.9% and Ku-band uplink with 16.1% accounted for the majority of spectrum requests. SpaceX was the only filer to have any requests for the E-band, demonstrating that most of the extremely high frequencies still remain impractical for most applicants. California had the highest number of ground station sites with 354 followed by Georgia with 308, and Alaska with 261. When considering the natural hazard risk of 4,963 unique, fixed sites within the continental U.S., 23.1% are located in a place that faces an average high risk across various natural hazards. This risk rises dramatically in certain states with 73.3% of California and 71.5% of Florida ground stations facing an average high natural hazard risk. There were 75,845 conditions placed on granted ground station filings with the majority being verbatim restatements of part 25 regulations, obfuscating which conditions go beyond existing regulations. Lastly, no widely used condition was linked to a dramatically longer time delay for applicants with the average delay between filing and granting being a median of 118 days (~17 weeks). Overall, this research provides a first of its kind overview of U.S. ground station filings at a time of substantial shifts in the satellite industry.