Interference to PCS Channels from SpaceX August 27, 2024 08:00
On August 16th, AT&T filed a petition to deny SpaceX's waiver request that would allow SpaceX to operate from space on T-Mobile's PCS G channels. From the Web Spectrum Viewer map below, it is evident that T-Mobile controls nationwide access to the PCS G channel except for some places in Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma where they are leasing those channels to regional carriers.
Spectrum Depth Map - T-Mobile (PCS-G):
AT&T indicted that modifying the out of band emissions would affect their operations on the channels they operate adjacent to the G block. As a reminder, the C11 channel indicated in the Spectrum Grid below, is the adjacent channel to the 5MHz G block channel (G1/G2) that SpaceX wants to operate on.
Spectrum Grid:
To see the the see the carrier that could receive the interference that AT&T is modeling, we can look at a Spectrum Ownership Map from our Web Spectrum Viewer. The Spectrum Ownership Map shows the owner (or lessee) of the C11 channel for every US county highlighted with each national or regional carrier's branding colors. The white areas represent smaller carriers. In the Web Spectrum Viewer you can place your mouse over each of the county areas to see the county name and the controlling carrier As the map reveals, T-Mobile is the adjacent band operator in many of the counties as they indicated in their response to opposition filing.
Spectrum Ownership Map:
The table below highlights the number of counties that the Top 6 carriers that own the PCS C11 channel adjacent to the PCS G block. This table utilized tabular spectrum ownership data from our Spectrum Grid along with the estimated 2022 population for each county from the same tool.
| Carrier | Counties Owned | % of Counties | Population Sum | % of Population |
| T-Mobile | 1399 | 40.1%` | 184,121,282 | 54.6% |
| AT&T | 915 | 28.3% | 66,836,869 | 19.8% |
| Verizon | 631 | 19.5% | 72,904,442 | 21.6% |
| USCellular | 134 | 4.1% | 6,613,176 | 2.0% |
| Viaero | 84 | 2.6% | 1,172,483 | 0.3% |
| C Spire | 32 | 1.0% | 1,087,192 | 0.3% |
From this data, we can see that T-Mobile would be subjecting itself to interference in 40.1% of the US counties, over a population that is greater than 1/2 the US population. At this time we don't know the detail on which PCS licenses that USCellular has agreed to sell to T-Mobile so they are evaluated separately, knowing that those counties could be added to T-Mobile's self interference category. AT&T would be affected in 28.3% of US counties impacting roughly 66 million people.
