ITU rules meeting: Geopolitical ‘fireworks,’ DoD spectrum challenges

WASHINGTON — While every international meeting comes with a large dose of geopolitics, this year’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rule-making summit is expected to start off with a bang — as nations spar over the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the nitty-gritty of global spectrum management that could affect the national security and economic interests of many countries, including the US.

Key national security concerns for the US going into the Nov. 20-Dec. 15 World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 (WRC-23) include protection of Defense Department radars and enabling the use of spectrum for future military and Intelligence Community missions. The US is also concerned about efforts by China, Russia and Iran to challenge its technological edge in several areas, including with respect to low Earth orbit (LEO) mega-constellations — such as SpaceX’s Starlink, which has drawn political ire from all three at recent UN meetings.

The 193-nation ITU, a treaty-based organization, manages spectrum usage that crosses borders to prevent interference and ensure that all nations have equal access. That said, each member country has the right to regulate radio frequency (RF) spectrum use inside its borders — as the US does via the semi-independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In addition, the National Telecommunications Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department, coordinates spectrum use by federal agencies including the Defense Department.

The US WRC-23 delegation is led by Stephen Lang, State Department deputy assistant secretary for international information and communications policy, and includes representatives from DoD and other government agencies. The delegation also includes representatives of a number of US firms across the telecoms sector, as well as independent legal eagles.

“The United States’ top priorities for the conference include expanding connectivity and driving innovation by harmonizing bands for 5G, creating a pipeline for 6G, and preserving spectrum for unlicensed uses like WiFi. We will seek to unlock the space economy and the next generation of space science with proposals to enable the successful deployment of low Earth orbit satellite systems for internet service while protecting geostationary satellite services and a proposal for future study of frequency bands and a new regulatory framework for cislunar communications,” Lang told Breaking Defense in an email.

“Even as we work to identify new spectrum for these services, we will preserve critical spectrum for US national defense systems and aviation and maritime safety,” he added.

The Shadow Of Geopolitics

An almost routine ritual at every-four-year WRC meetings, according to several long-time participants, is a spat during the opening day when countries present their credentials over the legitimacy of Israel’s status.

This year, that issue is expected to be incendiary, due in large part to Israel’s controversial war on Hamas in Gaza. To further complicate matters, a group of Arab nations also intend to push for Palestine to be recognized as a country and provided spectrum allocations for its use.

“This year it’s going to be a little worse. So people are estimating it will take two days,” said one frustrated industry official.

Additionally, Russia desires to take the lead for several future WRC study groups, requests that are unlikely to be fulfilled due to Western objections to Moscow’s ongoing war with Ukraine. Fireworks are expected on this too, as word on the street is that Russia intends to wield its well-known mastery of procedural minutia to put pressure on delegations to back its nominees.

Finally, Washington’s fierce competition with China over the 5G mobile wireless market, and the future 6G market, is a lurking bilateral battle. The US government has repeatedly raised national security concerns about the equipment manufactured by Chinese suppliers, such as Huawei and ZTE, and pressed allies and partners to abandon trade with them. There are proposals on the table from Beijing that would harmonize 5G mobile wireless use around the six gigahertz (6 GHz) spectrum band used in China — raising the specter that Chinese telecom behemoths will gain even more of a hold on the international market.

“The political dynamics of the world will certainly add an interesting flavor to the conference itself,” George John, an attorney at Hogan Lovells specializing in spectrum issues who is part of the WRC-23 US delegation, told Breaking Defense.

Pentagon Spectrum Woes

“Going into WRC-23, there are three areas of concern for any military operations. The first and most obvious is the potential for direct impact — through interference or lack of access to spectrum — to military operations ranging from radar to terrestrial sensors to satellite communications,” Katherine Gizinski, CEO of River Associates, told Breaking Defense.

A number of nations are pushing for the ITU to reallocate to commercial wireless communications a swath of mid-band spectrum between 3 GHz and 10 GHz. Those frequencies now are used by DoD and IC intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites, as well as radar systems such as that equipping the Navy’s Aegis Combat System.

In particular, the US is pushing back against a proposal, led by Brazil, for repurposing the 10 GHz band in ITU Region 2 encompassing North, Central and South America, John said.

That band is used by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to provide detailed pictures of the Earth, including through clouds and at night. SAR-sats, in particular commercial birds, have been used during the Ukraine war, raising hackles in Moscow and fears in a number of other countries about spying.

While the US could protect the 10 GHZ band for SAR satellite use inside its own borders, John explained that if other countries in the region decide to allow wireless communications in the band, their broadcasts likely would cause signals interference and “degrade the picture quality” from the US satellites.

Gizinski said that beyond direct impacts, the Pentagon also has to worry about the health of the commercial satellite industry.

“The US DoD is increasingly reliant on the use of commercial satellite bandwidth to fulfill data transfer requirements, including the procurement of approximately a billion dollars of commercial satellite bandwidth annually. Changes carried out as a result of the WRC process can impact these commercial satellite organizations and their ability to deliver satellite capacity to fulfill these government demands,” she explained.

In addition, Gizinski said, private investors in new types of space activities that have caught Pentagon interest could be spooked by spectrum use shifts made during WRC-23.

“Changing dynamics in the allocation of RF frequencies creates volatility and often requires additional capital investment — both behaviors that can suppress future investment,” she said.

From LEO To Cislunar — Jockeying For Access To Emerging Capabilities

There are a number of proposals for studies on how to create what proponents call “equitable access” for developing countries to the use of certain spectrum bands by satellites in LEO and medium Earth orbits between about 100 kilometers above the Earth to geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) at about 36,000 kilometers, according to several WRC-23 participants.

Further, Iran has a specific proposal designed to block Starlink’s ability to broadcast into its territory, based on an October ruling made by the ITU Radio Regulations Board that ordered SpaceX to cease operations in Iran because Tehran has not authorized the use of its terminals. Iran’s position has been backed by some countries in the Caribbean as well as Egypt, according to one US industry source with access to the ITU’s proceedings.

Meanwhile, there is a competing proposal from the US that would, in effect, lessen requirements for preventing interference to GEO satellites from LEO mega-constellations, like Starlink and Amazon’s planned Kuiper, that a lot of other countries, especially from the developing world, oppose.

Indeed, the industry source said that protecting SpaceX equities is high on the FCC’s agenda at the meeting. (SpaceX further has a relatively new contract to the Space Force to provide internet service from its Starlink clone tweaked for military use, called Starshield.)

The upshot, the source added, could be that there is an agreement for a study to be presented at the next WRC in 2027 that includes a number of options for LEO and MEO frequency use.

There also is an intriguing proposal on WRC-23 agenda that would give the ITU the go-ahead to begin allocating frequencies for use by spacecraft in cislunar orbit between the Earth and the Moon, and for communications on the lunar surface.

The Space Force and US Space Command are already eyeing future operations in cislunar space. Enabling communications in cislunar orbit and on the Moon also is extremely important for NASA’s ambitious Artemis endeavor to send humans back to the Moon, and then on to Mars.

Perhaps even more indicative of a future need for spectrum management around and on the Moon is the fact that there now are myriad commercial firms from around the world gearing up for activities there, another US industry source following WRC-23 said.

This source noted that ITU officials are “really interested in the in the items for study around this issue, because we don’t have a set of standards” for RF communications there.

The United States was the original proponent of the proposal at the ITU by the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission, or CITEL, for a future agenda item on lunar communications and strongly supports it. CITEL met in May to put together its agreed WRC-23 proposals.

John summed up that there are many proposals on the table with potential ramifications for the US and the Pentagon, and that it too early to predict “how it’s all going to pan out.”

However, he added, “fireworks … will occur for sure.”