Groundwave Weekly — May 03, 2026
Week of May 3, 2026
The Big Picture
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 The FCC repealed a 1990s rule that had been quietly capping satellite broadband, then turned around and locked SpaceX and Amazon into the only two spectrum bands that matter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.
What Just Shipped
- 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.
This Week's Stories
The FCC Just Killed a 1990s Speed Limit on Satellite Broadband
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 Leo Just Hit 300 Satellites — and Needs About 1,300 More in 90 Days
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.
The FCC Drew a Hard Line Around Satellite Spectrum — and It Benefited SpaceX and Amazon
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 War That's Threatening the Internet's Plumbing
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.
AT&T's Open RAN Experiment Finally Got a Real Street-Level Test
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.
⚡ What Most People Missed
- The Space Development Agency just put 21 Link 16 satellites into operational service: York Space Systems built them; they carry Link 16 tactical data capability and K-band relay; and SDA also demonstrated optical inter-satellite links across the tranche. This is the military mirror of the commercial laser-mesh architecture — and it's now operational, not experimental. The first JADC2 command-and-control gateway also received continuous Authority to Operate this week, meaning it can self-update software in production without classic ATO pauses.
- The FCC just got its first real map of who's inside America's submarine cables: The March 31, 2026 deadline for the new consolidated Capacity Holder Report passed, requiring every U.S. cable landing licensee to disclose who owns or operates the submarine line terminal equipment — the hardware that actually lights the fiber at each end. The 2025 Report and Order also bans foreign-adversary entities from holding IRUs that would let them install or manage SLTE on U.S.-landing cables (Federal Register). What's in those filings could trigger the next wave of license revocations.
- Utah just made VPNs a legal liability for websites: The law, framed as age verification, establishes the principle that a website can be held liable for failing to detect and block users masking their location. The mechanism — requiring platforms to identify and block VPN traffic — is functionally identical to what Iran, Russia, and China require. If it survives First Amendment challenge, every authoritarian government gets a U.S. legal precedent to cite.
- The Army is buying electronic warfare and SIGINT off the shelf, faster: On April 28, the Army's Capability Program Executive Office for Intelligence and Spectrum Warfare opened a Commercial Solutions Opening to build a "library" of mature commercial EW and SIGINT systems commanders can pull from quickly. The doctrinal signal — the spectrum layer is now a place where commercial cadence beats bespoke programs — is bigger than the procurement itself.
- T-Mobile is quietly assembling a fiber empire: Two 50-50 joint ventures announced April 28 — with Oak Hill Capital (rolling up GoNetspeed and Greenlight Networks) and Wren House (acquiring i3 Broadband) — add more than a million homes passed, with 1.3 million expected from GoNetspeed/Greenlight by year-end and 500,000 from i3. This isn't really a consumer broadband play. It's backhaul and densification for a wireless operator that wants to control its own physical layer.
- The Brennan Center flagged JADC2's commercial data fusion as a new exploitation surface: As DoD pulls commercial and open-source feeds into all-domain command and control, blending those streams with classified data creates AI-driven advantages and adversary manipulation vectors at the same time, per the Brennan Center analysis. The guardrails haven't been written yet.
📅 What to Watch
- If the FCC denies Amazon's extension request before July 30, 2026, the LEO market consolidates around Starlink for years — not because Amazon disappears, but because the cost of relicensing eats the rest of the decade.
- If any submarine cable in the Red Sea or Strait of Hormuz gets severed in the next two weeks, the inability to safely deploy repair ships becomes the story — and reveals that hyperscaler resilience plans assumed peacetime sea lanes.
- If a GEO operator files for reconsideration of the EPFD repeal, the real fight moves to the ITU and WRC-27, where the U.S. position becomes much harder to hold unilaterally.
- If Utah's VPN-liability law faces a major First Amendment challenge, the resulting ruling will set the ceiling on how far state-level location-verification mandates can go before they become unconstitutional.
- If Russia announces an accelerated launch cadence for its Sfera/Skif LEO program, the Starlink import ban becomes coherent strategy rather than performative sovereignty — and a new front opens in the LEO spectrum coordination fight.
- If the FCC's Capacity Holder Report filings produce any license revocations or SLTE divestiture orders, expect a chilling effect on Asia-Pacific cable consortia that include Chinese-affiliated equipment vendors.
The Closer
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.