The regulatory baseline that every U.S. satellite-broadband filing has been drafted against for a quarter century just changed. On May 13, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a Report and Order, published in the Federal Register as document 2026-09565, that retires the Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) limits the agency has relied on since the late 1990s to keep non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) systems from interfering with geostationary orbit (GSO) networks. In their place the Commission installs what it calls modern, performance-based GSO protection criteria, layered on top of a good-faith coordination regime between operators.
EPFD is, in essence, a hard ceiling: a numerical cap on how much aggregate power an NGSO constellation may radiate into the look-angle of a protected GSO satellite. Those caps were calibrated against the satellite technology of the Clinton era, before mega-constellations, electronically steered user terminals, and digital beam-shaping were operational realities. The Commission's complaint is that holding NGSO systems to that ceiling in 2026 forces them to throttle capacity well below what their hardware can deliver, and that the people who pay for that conservatism are disproportionately rural and remote subscribers who have no terrestrial alternative.
"The consequence today of applying such EPFD limits in the United States is that operators must overprotect GSO systems, which in turn means that American households and businesses-- most critically in rural and remote areas--do not receive the fastest space-based NGSO satellite broadband American innovation has available."— Federal Register, source
The word that does the heavy lifting in that passage is "overprotect." The Commission is asserting that the static EPFD masks are now systematically too conservative—that they reserve interference margin for GSO operators that those operators do not, in practice, need, and that the reserved margin shows up as foregone NGSO throughput. Replacing a fixed numerical mask with "performance-based" criteria is a meaningful shift in regulatory philosophy: instead of certifying compliance against a single emission ceiling, NGSO operators will increasingly have to demonstrate that the GSO link continues to perform to a defined standard, which is a more dynamic and arguably more contestable test.
Coordination becomes the load-bearing mechanism
The second half of the Order is, if anything, the more consequential for how spectrum disputes will actually be resolved. The Commission extends a framework for good-faith coordination, allowing NGSO and GSO operators to "bargain for appropriate interference protections through voluntary, private agreement." In plain terms, the regulator is stepping back from prescribing the interference outcome and instead refereeing a negotiation between the parties. Where coordination succeeds, the operators write their own protection terms; where it fails, the Commission's "technical backstops" reassert a default level of GSO protection.
That structure rewards operators who come to the table with credible technical models and a willingness to deal, and it disadvantages those who would rather litigate a fixed limit. It also quietly shifts engineering effort: under EPFD, the burden was to prove your constellation stayed under a published mask; under the new regime, the burden becomes demonstrating, in a coordination proceeding, that your system does not degrade a counterparty's defined performance. Expect the technical record—link budgets, interference apportionment methodologies, aggregate-effect modeling across hundreds of NGSO planes—to migrate from one-time certification filings into the substance of bilateral negotiations.
Why the IP and competitive picture moves with it
For anyone reading this beat for its competitive-intelligence value, the rule change reshapes what is worth patenting and disclosing. The EPFD era incentivized filings around power control, antenna discrimination, and avoidance maneuvers tuned to a static mask. A performance-based, coordination-driven regime raises the premium on technologies that let an NGSO operator dynamically prove non-degradation: real-time interference measurement, adaptive beam nulling toward GSO arc positions, and per-link power management that can be instrumented and reported. The systems that can credibly show, in a coordination proceeding, that they protect a GSO partner's defined performance will hold negotiating leverage that competitors relying on coarse static compliance will not.
It is worth stating precisely what this document is and is not. It is a Report and Order—a final rule—not a notice of proposed rulemaking, so the EPFD-to-performance shift is adopted, not merely floated. But the operational detail of how GSO protection is measured will be worked out in subsequent proceedings; the Commission almost immediately opened a companion inquiry into the GSO reference links that the new criteria depend on. That sequencing matters: the headline framework is settled, while the parameters that determine who wins a close coordination dispute remain in play.
The near-term watch items are concrete. Incumbent GSO operators will press for reference parameters and backstops that approximate the protection they enjoyed under EPFD; NGSO challengers will argue that anything resembling the old mask defeats the Order's stated purpose. The first contested coordination filing under the new regime will function as a precedent, and the technical methodologies blessed there will propagate across the docket. For now, the EPFD ceiling that shaped a generation of satellite-broadband engineering is, by the Commission's own description, no longer the rule of the road.
One more structural consequence deserves flagging. By moving from a published mask to negotiated, performance-based protection, the Commission has effectively privatized a large share of interference policy. The terms that govern how a given NGSO constellation coexists with a given GSO network will increasingly live in confidential bilateral agreements rather than in a public rule, which makes the regime harder to observe from the outside and raises the value of the few signals that do surface—coordination filings, backstop invocations, and the reference-link parameters still under consideration. Analysts who want to understand who actually holds the spectrum advantage will have to read those secondary traces, because the headline rule no longer tells you the answer. The EPFD era was legible precisely because it was rigid; the new era trades that legibility for flexibility, and the operators best equipped to exploit flexibility are the ones with the strongest technical and negotiating benches.