On May 13, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission published a Report and Order that quietly rewrites one of the most consequential rules in satellite communications. Modernizing Spectrum Sharing for Satellite Broadband, carried under SB Docket No. 25-157 (FCC 26-26), abandons the Equivalent Power Flux Density framework, EPFD for short, that has governed how non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) systems coexist with geostationary orbit (GSO) systems in the United States. The rule is effective July 13, 2026, with two narrow amendments, to Sections 25.146(a)(3) and 25.289(a)(2), indefinitely delayed pending a later Commission notice. For an industry where interference math determines who gets to sell broadband to a farmhouse in Montana, this is a foundational change, not a tweak.
To understand why it matters, start with the geometry the old rule was built to manage. GSO satellites sit in a fixed arc roughly 35,786 kilometers up, appearing stationary over the equator. NGSO constellations, the architecture behind modern low-earth-orbit broadband, sweep across the sky in large numbers at much lower altitudes. When an NGSO spacecraft passes near the line between an earth station and a GSO satellite, its transmissions can spill into the GSO receiver. The EPFD limits, developed in the late 1990s and embedded in international and domestic rules, were the agreed-upon ceiling on that spillover. The problem the Commission identifies is bluntly stated in the record: applying those decades-old limits today forces NGSO operators to "overprotect GSO systems."
From rigid power limits to performance-based protection
Overprotection has a real cost. When an NGSO operator must throttle power or geometry to stay under a 1990s envelope that assumed a far less crowded, far less capable sky, the practical consequence is slower service. The Order is explicit that the people who lose most are "American households and businesses, most critically in rural and remote areas," who do not receive the fastest space-based broadband American innovation can deliver. The EPFD limits, in other words, were not merely conservative; they were calibrated to a technological era that has passed, and the calibration error now lands on exactly the underserved users the broadband programs are meant to reach.
The replacement is a shift in regulatory philosophy from prescriptive to performance-based. Rather than dictate a fixed power-flux ceiling, the Order adopts "modern, performance-based GSO protection criteria" grounded in the technical record of the proceeding. The distinction is the heart of the rule. A prescriptive limit says how an NGSO system must behave at every instant; a performance-based criterion says what level of protection a GSO system is entitled to and lets operators find efficient ways to deliver it. That flexibility is where the recovered capacity, and therefore the faster rural broadband, comes from.
Good-faith coordination, with backstops
The second pillar is procedural. The Order extends the Commission's framework for good-faith coordination, allowing "NGSO and GSO operators to bargain for appropriate interference protections through voluntary, private agreement." This is a deliberate move toward letting the parties closest to the engineering negotiate the trade-offs, two operators who understand their own systems can often craft sharper, mutually beneficial arrangements than a one-size-fits-all federal limit. Coordination is the antenna-and-geometry equivalent of a spectrum treaty: spectrum plus orbital geometry, settled by the people who actually fly the hardware.
But voluntary coordination has an obvious failure mode, the holdout, so the Order does not leave protection to goodwill alone. It "adopts technical backstops to protect GSO systems when coordination has not been reached." That structure, private bargaining as the default with a regulatory floor as the fallback, is the load-bearing design choice. It preserves the incumbent GSO operator's baseline rights even if negotiations collapse, which is what makes the deregulation politically and technically defensible. Without the backstop, dropping EPFD would simply transfer risk onto GSO incumbents; with it, the Commission can claim it has modernized the ceiling without removing the floor.
What it means for the competitive landscape
The practical winners are NGSO broadband operators, who gain headroom to deliver higher throughput where they were previously power-limited, and the rural and remote users the rule repeatedly foregrounds. GSO operators retain protection but now hold it through performance criteria and coordination rights rather than a fixed power envelope, a change that rewards operators willing to negotiate and that puts a premium on technical sophistication at the coordination table. The two delayed provisions are a reminder that even a final rule can ship with carve-outs: Sections 25.146(a)(3) and 25.289(a)(2) await a separate effective-date notice, so counsel should not treat the entire framework as live on July 13.
There is a larger pattern here worth naming. The EPFD limits were a global compromise of the late 1990s, and the United States moving to performance-based domestic criteria creates a divergence between national rules and the international baseline that other administrations still apply. That divergence is itself a competitiveness lever, U.S.-licensed NGSO systems can operate to a more permissive domestic standard, but it also raises coordination complexity for systems that cross borders and frequency-coordination regimes. The Order's reliance on private good-faith agreements is in part an acknowledgment that no single fixed number can capture that complexity anymore.
For the commercial-space reader, the bottom line is that an obscure-sounding acronym just stopped being the binding constraint on American satellite broadband capacity. The Commission has bet that performance criteria plus negotiated coordination, with a hard technical backstop, will extract more usable bandwidth from the same orbital real estate than a frozen 1990s formula ever could. Whether that bet pays off will be measured not in the Federal Register but in download speeds at the edge of the grid, and in how many GSO-NGSO coordination agreements actually get signed before the backstops have to do the work.