French conglomerate Alcatel Alsthom plans an unorthodox regulatory campaign for SkyBridge LLC, its 64-satellite broadband satellite project, which will be anchored by an unprecedented spectrum-sharing scheme that company officials say will allow the system to use 1.05 GHz worth of ordinarily congested Ku-band frequencies.

Under international rules, low-Earth-orbit systems such as SkyBridge must not interfere with geostationary systems. But SkyBridge, formerly Sativod, will have unique sharing fea tures, as outlined to reporters at a Feb. 24 news briefing. In particular, SkyBridge birds whose spotbeams pass under the GEO arc (from the perspective of one of the system’s 250 planned Earth stations) will shut off those beams entire ly, to avoid interference. All traffic that would have passed through the primary satellite will be routed to a second bird in an adjacent plane.

Alcatel designed the system backwards from traditional methods, said Walter Morgan, a Clarksburg, Md.-based engineering consultant assisting Alcatel with SkyBridge. Whereas system architects usually design a service, then worry about interference, "this thing was designed from day one not to produce interference, in the FCC and ITU meanings, to other systems," he said.

Broadly, the $3.5 billion system will provide bandwidth on demand for residential and business customers, ranging from Internet access to services including enterprise networking and videoconferencing, said Pascale Sourisse, director-strategy with Alcatel Telecom. Service is slated to begin in 2001.

But while the SkyBridge service plan echoes those of other broadband hopefuls –most notably, Teledesic Corp.–its regulatory approach is unique. SkyBridge LLC filed its space seg ment application with the FCC on Feb. 28, and will use the United States as its notifying body before the ITU.

Alcatel chose to use the U.S. process for several reasons, said Phillip Spector, of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison: the U.S. satellite market is large, and Alcatel has a significant existing presence; the U.S. regulatory process is the most open; and U.S. rules allowing the entry of foreign satellite operators were unclear, since FCC policymaking is ongoing.

But aside from the regulatory revisions necessary to use Ku-band GEO frequencies, the SkyBridge team has one other, substantial hurdle: Convincing incumbent Ku-band operators that the sharing scheme indeed will work.