Ligado Wants NOAA Spectrum for Direct-to-Device Satellite Service
Aviation groups and others told Congress they feared interference from Ligado’s plans.
WASHINGTON, May 4, 2026 – The government is a ways away from auctioning the first slice of federal spectrum identified for commercial use, but companies already have ideas for how to use it.
Representatives from satellite company Ligado, including CEO Doug Smith, met with Federal Communications Commission staff last week to let them know the company was interested in 1675-1680 MegaHertz (MHz) spectrum.
Ligado wants to use the airwaves for direct-to-device satellite service through a partnership it’s pursuing with AST SpaceMobile. AST would have access to 45 megahertz of Ligado’s L-band spectrum for its direct-to-device services under the deal, which is part of Ligado’s bankruptcy proceeding and which the FCC has not yet approved.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which manages federal spectrum use, told the FCC in February that it had cleared the 5 megahertz block of spectrum for mobile use. NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth said the band could be promising for direct-to-device and that the agency would continue to study it for that purpose.
“The Ligado representatives concurred with this assessment and relayed that if the company were to secure access to the 1675-1680 MHz band, that it anticipates using this band for D2D service using the payload that will be deployed on the AST SpaceMobile’s constellation,” Ligado wrote in a filing posted Monday.
The band is currently used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to receive data from satellites and weather balloons. NTIA found only a small number of ground stations would need to be protected by wireless carriers using the band.
Also in February, major chip manufacturer Qualcomm had asked the FCC to set aside 5 megahertz in the 1675-1695 MHz band – not necessarily the NOAA spectrum – for a proposed 5G “sidelink” technology. That, Qualcomm said, would allow public safety devices to share voice, video streams, and other data directly with each other in the event mobile coverage was poor or offline after a natural disaster.
Ligado urged the FCC not to select the NOAA spectrum for that purpose, arguing it would take the band out of the auction pipeline and affect the best use of spectrum in adjacent bands. The FCC has until September 2034 to auction 800 megahertz of spectrum, with 500 coming from federal users, under a July 2025 budget law.
One of those adjacent band uses would be private networking by utility companies in the 1670-1675 MHz band, which Ligado said would work alongside direct-to-device. The Utilities Technology Council told the FCC last month that it supported auctioning the NOAA spectrum, so that utilities can acquire this spectrum and potentially combine it together with spectrum in the 1670-1675 MHz band to be able to support 10 MHz” for private network operations.
The Western Fire Chiefs Association wrote the FCC last week to support Qualcomm’s plan, saying sidelink devices would be useful during increasingly frequent wildfire outages.
Anti-Ligado letter
Ligado and AST’s petition to use Ligado’s L-band spectrum for direct-to-device service, pitched in part as an alternative to SpaceX, which dominates the direct-to-device market, has its opponents. Satellite operators also in the band, Iridium and Inmarsat, feel AST and Ligado haven’t done the proper coordinating work to avoid interference with existing geostationary satellite systems.
The company is also locked in a $40 billion legal dispute with the Defense Department, arguing it has been blocked from deploying a terrestrial 5G network (also in the L-band) by a secret national security system despite having FCC authority to do so.
Dozens of groups, including major aviation industry associations, groups of meteorologists and other scientists, and geospatial companies wrote in a letter to Congress last week that they were concerned about both. The coalition, which includes Iridium, has opposed Ligado's plans in the past.
The groups asked lawmakers to “work with the FCC” to grant longstanding petitions to reconsider the 2020 order that greenlit a Ligado terrestrial network, and to protect L-band incumbents from interference resulting from the AST plan.
“Put simply, Ligado’s plans continue to create significant technical and public interest concerns for all L-band operators and users, their customers, and their beneficiaries among the public, industry, and government that we are hopeful you can help address,” the groups wrote.
They addressed their letter to the majority and minority leaders of each chamber, plus top lawmakers on the commerce and armed services committees in the House and Senate.
The groups wrote of the Ligado-AST proposal that there was “serious cause for concern that this latest proposal will create new harmful interference risks for the L-band community.”
In an emailed statement, a Ligado spokesperson said there was no reason to tie its current direct-to-device plans to the longstanding interference concerns over its still-unbuilt terrestrial network.
The idea the technical issues are the same "is simply wrong," the spokesperson wrote. "Ligado has provided mobile satellite services for decades without causing harmful interference, and the AST SpaceMobile arrangement concerns satellite-based use of L-band spectrum – not terrestrial 5G deployment."
AST, backed by AT&T and Verizon, recently got FCC approval to operate 248 of its massive BlueBird satellites to support direct-to-device services. The still-pending Ligado plan would operate with 96 satellites.
There’s bitter litigation over that too, as AST paid Inmarsat more than $500 million in exchange for Inmarsat’s public support of the deal, but Inmarsat sued over what it saw as a lack of coordination and made its opposition known anyway.
Member discussion