Concern over the potential loss of C-band spectrum for providing satellite services runs high in the Asia-Pacific region, an area of the globe that relies on the spectrum due to geographical and environmental constraints. AsiaSat CEO Peter Jackson talks to Via Satellite about the C-band issue and the potential impact for AsiaSat as well as the industry as a whole.
Via Satellite: What is your take on the demands for C-band spectrum resources and the competing arguments of telecoms and satellite players? Can the two sides reach a compromise?
Jackson: I must admit I do not understand how we got into this position. I appreciate the complex issues faced by governments in allocating spectrum but to allocate a frequency to WiMax which in a large numbers of countries is currently being used by satellites for essential services does not make sense. Perhaps governments thought that we could share the frequency, but it only required a simple test to prove that it does not work.
It will be interesting to see what will eventually happen in Europe, where C-band is used only in selected sites, and it has been assumed they can be protected. When WiMax transmitters become very prolific and even mobile, I am sure the C-band earth stations will suffer some level of interference.
Via Satellite: One of the arguments of satellite players that is being overshadowed is the importance of C-band in developing countries for providing basic communications. What would be the ramifications for these territories if this C-band capacity was assigned to terrestrial mobile players rather than satellite?
Jackson: It is not just developing countries but all countries that experience heavy rainfall and have to use the satellite C-band frequency for all services that demand the high reliability that Ku-band cannot meet. Our experience based on the test carried out in Hong Kong by OFTA, the government body responsible for frequency allocation, was that the frequency could not be shared and the whole of the C-band frequency would become unusable by satellites.
If the C-band was allocated to WiMax in every country in Asia the 52 C-band satellites that are currently in orbit over Asia would have no business and all the services they provide would have to find another connection method. However, with the low cost of terrestrial fiber, our customers only use satellite where it is impossible to terrestrial connections, so I would assume these services would have to move to Ku-band and live with the level of service that Ku-band can provide. But Ku-band generally has limited geographic coverage or just serves a single country, so a large coverage regional service would be impossible.
There has been talk about reassigning the so-called extended C-band to terrestrial services. The problem is that all of the C-band frontend receive equipment that is fitted on the satellite dishes that converts the very weak satellite C-band signal to a lower frequency are wideband and “see” all of the frequency from 3.4 to 4.2 gigahertz. Thus, even if a WiMax transmitter is operating at 3.5 gigahertz and not directly affecting the standard C-band — 3.6 gigahertz to 4.2 gigahertz — if it is in the vicinity of a C-band receiver it will swamp the C-band receiver making it impossible for any frequencies to be received not just the WiMax frequency.
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