Groundwave Weekly — May 03, 2026

This was the week the physical layer stopped being boring. The FCC repealed a 1990s rule that had been quietly capping satellite broadband, then turned around and locked SpaceX and Amazon into the only two spectrum bands that matter for direct-to-device. Amazon Leo crossed 300 satellites with about 1,300 still to go and roughly 88 days to do it. And in the Gulf, two of the planet's most important data chokepoints are now both effectively closed to commercial shipping and to repair ships at the same time — an occurrence experts say is unprecedented in recent history.

• Amazon Leo LE-02 Mission (Amazon / Arianespace): 32 satellites delivered to LEO from French Guiana on April 30 aboard Ariane 6 — Amazon's first European launch for the constellation.
• Amazon Leo LA-06 Mission (Amazon / ULA): 29 satellites lofted on Atlas V from Cape Canaveral on April 27, pushing the constellation past the 300-satellite mark.
• SDA Tranche with York Space Systems (Space Development Agency): 21 operational satellites carrying Link 16 tactical datalinks and K-band relay payloads, with optical inter-satellite links demonstrated.
• FCC EPFD Rule Replacement (Federal Communications Commission): May 1, 2026 order replacing the late-1990s Equivalent Power Flux Density caps on non-geostationary satellites with a coordination-based framework.
• FCC Big LEO Spectrum Order (FCC Space Bureau): April 24 order denying market-access requests from SpaceX, Kepler, Sateliot, and AST SpaceMobile in the 1.6/2.4 GHz MSS bands.

The rule that's been quietly capping how much power LEO satellites can beam toward Earth was written when the most advanced satellite constellation in existence was Iridium and "broadband from space" was science fiction. On May 1, 2026, the FCC voted to replace it.

The old framework — Equivalent Power Flux Density, or EPFD — capped how hard non-geostationary satellites could transmit, originally to protect older geostationary (GEO) operators from interference. According to the FCC's announcement, the updated rules let operators manage interference using current technical standards rather than power limits drafted around 1990s system designs, and allow GEO and non-GEO operators to negotiate protections through voluntary agreements (ExecutiveGov summary of the order). The technical and legal rationale is laid out in the FCC's release document.

If this works, LEO broadband finally gets to operate at the power levels its physics allows, AST SpaceMobile's direct-to-handset model gets meaningfully more headroom, and rural connectivity economics shift. If it fails, GEO operators — Viasat, Intelsat, SES — challenge it in court or at the ITU, where EPFD limits are internationally harmonized and the U.S. just unilaterally walked away from them. The signal to watch: whether any GEO operator files a petition for reconsideration in the next 30 days, and whether ITU-R study groups put EPFD revision on the WRC-27 agenda.

Amazon's satellite internet service — rebranded from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo last year — had a genuinely impressive week. Two launches on two continents in seven days pushed the constellation past 300 production satellites: LE-02 on an Ariane 6 from French Guiana on April 30 (32 satellites), and LA-06 on an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral on April 27 (29 satellites), per Amazon's mission tracker.

The problem is the math. Under its FCC license, Amazon must operate half the constellation — 1,618 satellites — by July 30, 2026. It has about 302. Cape Canaveral Today reports Amazon expects roughly 700 operational satellites by the deadline and has asked the FCC to extend the milestone to 2028, with a ruling expected in the coming months (Cape Canaveral Today).

If the FCC grants the extension, Amazon gets the runway it needs and the LEO market becomes a real two-horse race. If it doesn't, Amazon's first-generation license is in jeopardy and Starlink's moat deepens by years. The EPFD ruling above suggests this FCC is broadly pro-LEO, which probably helps Amazon's case — but "probably" is doing a lot of work when 1,300 satellites and a multi-billion-dollar service launch are on the line. Watch for the FCC's order on the extension request; that's the single most consequential satellite broadband decision of 2026.

While the EPFD ruling got the headlines, an April 24 FCC order may matter just as much for how the satellite industry shakes out. The Commission reaffirmed Globalstar and Iridium's exclusive rights to the "Big LEO" mobile satellite services band — the 1.6/2.4 GHz spectrum that's been theirs since the 1990s — and dismissed petitions from SpaceX, Kepler Communications, Sateliot, and AST SpaceMobile that asked to share into it (Via Satellite).

The twist: the order locks in regulatory certainty for two transactions already in flight — SpaceX's purchase of EchoStar 2 GHz spectrum and Amazon's purchase of Globalstar. The full Space Bureau order (DA-26-398A1) cites more than $28 billion of deal flow tied to roughly 130 MHz of direct-to-device spectrum.

If this ruling holds, SpaceX and Amazon end up with exclusive lanes in the two most valuable D2D bands in the country, and AST SpaceMobile, Kepler, and Sateliot have to find different spectrum paths or fold into someone else's stack. If it gets reversed on appeal — or if WRC-27 reopens the band internationally — the duopoly that just got written into U.S. spectrum policy could come apart fast. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed the decision as "laser-focused on making our rules as friendly as possible for investment and innovation in D2D services." Friendly for innovation and friendly for competition are not the same sentence.

The U.S.-Iran conflict has a communications dimension most coverage is missing entirely. For the first time, both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea are effectively closed to commercial traffic, and seventeen submarine cables pass through the Red Sea alone, carrying the majority of data between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google spent years building Gulf data centers betting the region would become a global AI hub. The undersea cables connecting those facilities to the rest of the world transit two narrow passages that are now both warzones, per Rest of World.

The genuinely dangerous part is repair. Specialized cable repair ships can't safely enter either passage right now, and as Daily Sabah noted in its analysis, civilian repair operations in mined waters under active fire would face prohibitive war insurance, special permits, and military escorts (Daily Sabah opinion). Doug Madory of Kentik told Rest of World: "Closing both choke points simultaneously would be a globally disruptive event. I'm not aware of that ever happening."

If a single cable gets cut and stays cut for weeks, the rerouting forces traffic through Asia or around Africa, latency spikes, and the AI infrastructure built in the Gulf starts looking less like a hub and more like a stranded asset. The signal to watch is mundane and specific: any NetBlocks or Kentik report of measurable latency or BGP-path changes affecting Gulf-to-Europe routes. That's the early warning that something has been physically severed.

Open RAN — the push to make radio networks mix-and-match instead of locked to one vendor — has spent years sounding more like a policy slogan than a network. This week it got something better: drive-test data from Dallas. Light Reading reports that Signals Research Group compared Ericsson and 1Finity small-cell radios inside AT&T's Open RAN deployment on 5G bands n77 and n66 and found they performed "largely the same."

Modest is the point. Open RAN only matters if swapping vendors doesn't wreck performance, and a successful interoperability test on actual streets is more meaningful than another standards-body milestone. If the broader rollout later this year preserves these results in denser, messier conditions, Open RAN moves from political promise to procurement option — and Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung lose some of their lock-in. If performance degrades at scale, this stays a niche play for greenfield deployments only. Watch carrier capex disclosures: a real Open RAN shift shows up as a step-change in the supplier mix, not in press releases.

A satellite mesh humming with infrared lasers over the Pacific, a cable repair ship idling outside the Strait of Hormuz with its insurance broker on hold, and a Utah lawyer trying to explain to a judge why a website should know what a VPN is. The 1990s wrote the rules that governed all of this; the 2020s are dismantling them one order at a time, and nobody has agreed yet on what replaces them. Until next week.

Forward this to the person you know who still thinks "the cloud" is a metaphor.