The person with a September start date on a Viasat contract is now waiting on a compliance notification from a regulator, a step no procurement plan accounts for. The FCC granted ViaSat-3 F2 US market access in late July and wrote the catch into the grant itself: Viasat must refrain from commencing, or otherwise cease, operations in the 18.8-19.3 GHz and 28.6-29.1 GHz bands until compliance is notified [5][6]. Coordination stopped being good practice there and became a precondition for switching on part of the payload.
That is the lever SpaceX is pulling. Its petition asks for a block or strict operational restrictions [1], and David Goldman's filing, which accuses Viasat of operating in the NGSO Ka-bands "without making any meaningful attempt to coordinate," says Viasat's own coexistence analysis, the study submitted to show F2 could share those bands, indicates the satellite could cause interference approximately one-third of the time when downlinking in them [3][4].
The two contested slices are 500 MHz each, 1 GHz in total [9]. A third of a 24-hour day is about eight hours [10]. That is the order of magnitude SpaceX's proposed remedy implies: a fixed-capacity geostationary service going quiet on those frequencies for a third of the day, sold to customers who, per DataCenterDynamics, are less sympathetic than SpaceX to the idea of Viasat standing down whenever a Starlink satellite is in the way [16].
The geometry explains why each side thinks the other should move. F2 sits at 35,786 km, while Starlink's shells run 340 to 570 km with more than 11,000 satellites in them [11][12], putting the geostationary satellite roughly 63 to 105 times further out [13]. Directional antennas and angular separation can keep beams apart in principle [15], and the LEO operators' position is that the burden falls on the satellite doing the illuminating [14]. Steering continuously around 11,000 moving objects is a different job from demonstrating once, in a filing, that it can be done.
Buyers of satellite capacity notice whether the link held at the hour they needed it, and escalate when it did not. The capacity sheet they buy against tells them throughput and coverage. Neither document names the frequency band a beam uses or the license condition attached to it, and that is where the risk currently sits.
Two questions follow, worth checking against your own contract. Does it specify capacity and coverage only, or does it name frequencies and the regulatory conditions on them? And if those two bands stay dark past September, is the notice period shorter or longer than the time needed to get another operator's terminal installed and commissioned? Named bands plus fast switching means a service credit tied to the FCC condition can be asked for and meant. Capacity-only plus slow switching means a licensing exposure nobody quoted you for is being carried anyway.
Viasat's 2023 loss of F1 to a reflector deployment malfunction was a hardware risk, and the insurance market repriced around it [17]. The exposure on F2 lives in a docket instead, which makes the compliance notification, rather than the launch photograph, the document worth asking Viasat for in September.</body_markdown> </invoke>
