Iridium now expects the first launches of its Next satellite constellation in April, with the constellation to be fully operational by end of 2017, CEO Matt Desch said Thursday, announcing Q3 results. The company previously said it expected the first Next launch to come in December (see 1510230011). The new launch timeframe is due to "an updated delivery schedule" from Thales Alenia Space, Desch said.

Scripps Network Interactive and SES signed a deal to expand and move Scripps' North American distribution platform to a pair of SES space stations near the center of the orbital arc over North America, the satellite company said in a news release Wednesday. According to SES, SES-1 at 101 degrees west will deliver Scripps's HD content, while SES-3 at 103 degrees west will help in distribution of standard definition feeds.

Eutelsat ordered a high-throughput satellite from Thales Alenia Space as part of its effort to bring broadband connectivity services to Africa, it said in a news release Wednesday. The satellite, using Thales' new Spacebus Neo platform, will launch in 2019 with the aim of providing at least 75 Gbps of capacity across a 65-spotbeam network, Eutelsat said. The satellite follows a joint announcement by Eutelsat and Facebook earlier this month that they plan to use Spacecom's AMOS-6 satellite to jointly provide broadband in much of Sub-Saharan Africa (see 1510050037).

Garmin continues to voice worries on GPS interference from operations in adjacent bands. General Counsel Andrew Etkind met with FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and with Commissioner Ajit Pai chief of staff Matthew Berry, the GPS company said in ex parte filings posted Wednesday in docket 12-340 (see here and here). Garmin said Etkind talked up a proposed Transportation Department study of adjacent band interference -- which was heavily criticized by LightSquared, which wants to operate a wireless broadband network in adjacent spectrum (see 1510160022) -- and provided copies of GPS Innovation Alliance testimony submitted earlier this month in a House Communications Subcommittee hearing on improving federal spectrum systems. In that testimony, the GPSIA said using satellite spectrum for broadband poses big technical challenges since mobile broadband uplink transmissions "can be billions of times stronger" than low-power transmissions such as used by a Global Navigation Satellite System, and "attempts to attribute GNSS interference issues mainly to poor receiver design are misguided." GPSIA also said receiver regulation would "impede innovation," and "a more straightforward approach" would be to group similar spectrum uses together -- "a 'zoning' approach to spectrum management as opposed to a 'good fences make good neighbors' approach that requires the FCC to engage in extensive rule making and standards development." For GPS, GPSIA said, that would mean "avoiding authorization of high powered uses in this band now or in the future."

Harmonic continues to see “encouraging signs” that the Ultra HD market “is slowly gaining momentum,” CEO Patrick Harshman said on a Tuesday earnings call. Ultra HD TV sales “continue to grow” and H.265-compatible set-tops “are starting to be deployed,” he said. “We expect this market momentum to continue to build, while we continue to demonstrate superior picture quality at lower bit rates than our closest competitors, which in turn is enabling us to assemble a growing pipeline of new Ultra HD opportunities.” Harmonic’s partnership with NASA to launch North America’s first linear Ultra HD channel “is generating quite a bit of interest among our customers,” he said. The channel is available as a test and is on track to go “fully live” Sunday, he said.

The FCC is wasting time and effort on Globalstar's proposed terrestrial low-power service (TLPS), and should end the proceeding and deny the satellite company's request, Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said in a filing posted Monday in docket 13-213. It responded to a Globalstar submission last month detailing the company's TLPS test on a college campus (see 1509110018), and said the filing "proves nothing and is as vague and non-transparent as the prior Globalstar demonstrations." Bluetooth SIG called details about Bluetooth testing "almost insulting in their lack of detail and specificity." The group has said its own demonstrations earlier this year show that TLPS interference with Bluetooth could have detrimental effects on Bluetooth devices (see [Ref:1503240047]), and repeated that point now. That it was not asked to take part in this latest TLPS testing, despite having asked to be included, must point to "a real cause for concern that proper testing would expose," Bluetooth SIG said. Globalstar still hasn't made "a coherent case" for why it should be exempt from industrial, scientific and medical radio band regulations, Bluetooth SIG said. In a statement, Globalstar General Counsel Barbee Ponder said the SIG filing contained "nothing new," with the group "forget[ting] the collaborative testing that was done at the Commission in March which showed that TLPS had no perceptible impact on BlueTooth devices. Indeed, BlueTooth has refused to make available the audio files of their hearing aid demonstration that confirms the lack of any such impact. By contrast, we have posted a video of our demonstration showing the compatibility of TLPS with BlueTooth."

SES and travel industry content and connectivity company Global Eagle Entertainment signed a set of multiyear multitransponder agreements for Global Eagle to get additional bandwidth through SES for its services, SES said in a news release Tuesday. SES said Global Eagle already was adding bandwidth on six of its satellites, and the agreements also will see it providing teleport services and ground infrastructure. Global Eagle also will have access to the high-throughput satellite capacity on SES-12, SES-14 and SES-15, which are to be launched in 2017, it said.

LightSquared is happy to incorporate GPS network timing devices into its GPS/LTE compatibility testing if need be, though it and the GPS timing industry have already looked deeply into that issue and even come up with fixes, LightSquared said in an ex parte presentation posted Tuesday in FCC docket 12-340. The filing included LightSquared's Transportation Department filing as that agency took comments on DOT's proposed test plan to evaluate interference potential between LightSquared's proposed wireless broadband network and GPS devices -- a test plan LightSquared was highly critical of (see 1510210022). The test plan "establishes that DOT refused to measure what counts: the impact of any interference on performance of the device," LightSquared said Tuesday. Along with repeating those criticisms of DOT, LightSquared's latest filing was aimed at issues raised by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) in its DOT filing on GPS timing devices. ATIS member Alcatel-Lucent notified its customers about a new antenna that could resolve any adjacent band interference issues -- that notification springing from talks with LightSquared, it said.

Intelsat's opposition to the two-degree spacing rule largely involves it trying to secure a competitive advantage, particularly against nascent companies and new satellites, EchoStar and SES said in FCC ex parte filings (see here and here) in docket 12-267 posted Tuesday. They said that SES and EchoStar representatives met with Nicholas Degani of Commissioner Ajit Pai's office and separately with International Bureau staff, and defended the two-degree rule status quo and repeated their pushback against Intelsat arguments that ITU coordination would be preferable to the FCC spacing rules (see [Ref:1508210020]). Minus two-degree spacing, new satellite companies and space stations "could be blocked by incumbents indefinitely based on conservative ITU coordination criteria," the two said, saying Intelsat's holding of "numerous high priority ITU filings" would be to its benefit over other operators: "Operators -- primarily Intelsat -- would have effective veto power over any other operator's new or replacement satellites." Meanwhile, discussion of special protection for incumbents with satellites in operation that don't comply with the two-degree separation rule would similarly be to Intelsat's unfair benefit, EchoStar and SES said. "Given that Intelsat’s numerous ITU filings are among the oldest in the world, [it] will likely claim this special protection at virtually every orbital location," the net result being a de facto end to the two-degree policy anyway, they said. Instead, the satellite companies said, the FCC should keep the rule and increase two-degree spacing operating levels "to more realistically and accurately correspond with those of modern satellite systems." Intelsat didn't comment.

Gilat Satellite Networks will publicly unveil Architecture for SkyEdge II-c, its distributed architecture for the high-throughput satellite (HTS) market, this week at the China Satellite Conference in Beijing, the company said in a news release Tuesday. It said the programmable, cloud-based architecture allows networks of any size, using wide-beam and HTS, to deliver managed services in hosted or virtual network business models.