Mike Johns, Senior Manager ATA Speech to CommsDay Regional and Policy Forum 25/2/2026
Behind the Scenes: The Satellite Regulatory Environment
Satellite Plenary — CommsDay Regional & Policy Forum, QT Canberra, 25 February 2026
Mike Johns — Senior Manager, Satellite Services Working Group, Australian Telecommunications Alliance
I’m not going to talk about rockets, constellations, or who’s launching what. I’m not going to talk about SpaceX. I’m not going to talk about Amazon’s LEO plans, AST SpaceMobile, Lynk, OneWeb, or Telesat — not because they’re unimportant, but because you’ll hear directly from some of those operators themselves.
What I want to do instead is something a bit different. I want to pull the curtain back on something we almost never see — everything that has to go right, both globally and nationally, before any of those services can work at all. This is a story about the system behind the service.
Let’s start with something deceptively simple: a phone call. Someone in a remote part of Australia presses a button — and it works. The call connects. There’s no visible complexity. No spinning wheels. No sense of how much effort just went into that moment.
Today, I want to show you how many systems — technical, regulatory, and institutional — have to align, perfectly, for that single action to succeed.
Think of this as a backstage pass. The user never sees what happens behind the curtain. But that single phone call can involve satellites thousands of kilometres away, moving at extraordinary speeds, coordinated across borders, regulators, and rulebooks.
From the user’s perspective, nothing special happens. Behind the scenes, that call crosses international treaties, national regulators, spectrum coordination frameworks, orbital mechanics, and device certification regimes. This isn’t one system doing one job. It’s a system of systems — and it only works when everything lines up.
The very first fork in the road is where the satellite is. Geostationary, Medium and Low Earth orbit aren’t just engineering choices. They determine latency, coverage geometry, what ground infrastructure is needed, and even how regulators treat the service.
Before a regulator is involved, physics already has opinions — and they’re non‑negotiable. Everything else in this story builds on that first physical constraint.
But orbit allocation isn’t just physics — it’s law. Orbital positions aren’t empty space. They’re regulated real estate, managed internationally. Who can operate where, at what altitude, and with what coordination obligations is determined by the ITU Radio Regulations — treaty obligations binding on 193 countries — long before a satellite ever launches.
Most people assume this is a technical delay. It’s not. This is the point where physics turns into governance.
This is where the International Telecommunication Union enters the picture. The ITU doesn’t approve satellites in a commercial sense. Its role is coordination. It exists to ensure that one country’s satellite system doesn’t interfere with another’s — anywhere on Earth.
That coordination is slow, deliberate, and deeply technical by design. Because once harmful interference exists, you can’t fix it with policy statements or press releases.
By the time a satellite launches, most of the hard work is already done. ITU filings can be made years, sometimes decades, in advance — formal notifications submitted by national governments securing international recognition for frequencies and orbital slots. Coordination negotiations can involve dozens of administrations and operators.
Then there are World Radiocommunication Conferences, where the rules themselves are periodically reset. For many satellite systems, regulatory and coordination timelines are longer than the time it takes to design, build, and launch the satellite itself. That’s not inefficiency — it’s the price of global coexistence.
Every four years, the rules of the game are revisited. World Radiocommunication Conferences bring together thousands of engineers, regulators, and policymakers. These aren’t quick decisions. They’re built on years of technical studies and negotiations, and they result in political agreements that last for decades. The next conference is in 2027.
There are some thirty agenda items, or topics, many of which relate to satellites. Two of interest – Agenda Item 1.13, addressing satellite Direct‑to‑Device connectivity, and Agenda Item 1.12, addressing Mobile‑Satellite Service allocations for low‑data‑rate non‑geostationary, including LEO, constellations.
These are global decisions, and they’ll define what satellite‑to‑phone and satellite IoT services can look like well into the 2030s. That’s why spectrum debates are so intense — the consequences are long‑lived.
So, the satellite is coordinated internationally, frequencies are assigned, and the constellation is operational. Now the signal reaches Australia. At that point, the global rules aren’t enough.
Once the signal reaches Australia, we move from international coordination to national responsibility. Australia has its own spectrum plan, licensing frameworks, and authorisation requirements. Global alignment gets the signal to the border; national regulation determines whether it can actually be used here.
In Australia, satellite services don’t sit with a single authority. Communications policy sits with the Department of Communications. Spectrum planning, allocation, and licensing sit with the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Space activities — launches and returns — sit with the Australian Space Agency.
Each has a distinct role, and for good reasons. But a single satellite service can trigger obligations across all three — whether operators like it or not. This is where expectations and reality tend to collide. Coordination matters.
None of what I’ve described works by accident. Within the Australian Telecommunications Alliance, the Satellite Services Working Group brings together operators, manufacturers, integrators, service providers, and policy specialists.
Our members and their organisations are the ones doing the quiet work behind the scenes. They contribute technical input into ITU and World Radiocommunication Conference processes. They engage with ACMA on spectrum coexistence and licensing. They test devices and services under Australian conditions. And they translate global rules into services that can actually be deployed and used.
This is the work that makes universal coverage possible. Not glamorous. Absolutely essential.
Satellite spectrum never exists in isolation. It’s shared with terrestrial mobile networks, fixed links, defence systems, and scientific services. In the case where direct‑to‑device satellites use mobile spectrum, they’re guests in a crowded neighbourhood — and every neighbour has legitimate concerns about interference.
Every new satellite service is really a coexistence negotiation — not just between companies, but between services with very different priorities and risk profiles. This is where theory meets reality.
And the phone matters just as much as the satellite. Even if the satellite and spectrum are approved, the device still has to work. Antenna design, power limits, emissions, and safety standards all matter. Direct‑to‑device services push right up against what handsets were originally designed to do.
That’s why progress here is careful and incremental rather than instant.
Only when everything aligns does the call go through. Orbit, spectrum, international coordination, national authorisation, and device compliance all have to line up. When they do, the call connects.
And when it works, nobody notices — which is exactly how it should be. The system is invisible by design.
This system has existed for decades — but it’s now under real pressure. Direct‑to‑device blurs the historical boundary between mobile and satellite. Baseline expectations around availability and reliability are rising. More systems are trying to coexist in the same orbits and bands. And tolerance for failure is shrinking — socially as much as technically.
What used to be acceptable is no longer good enough.
The miracle isn’t the satellite. The miracle is that dozens of institutions, rules, and technical systems — many invisible — align well enough to make something simple feel effortless.
As Australia pushes for greater coverage, resilience, and inclusion, understanding this complexity is essential to making informed decisions and providing the services that are needed for regional, rural, remote and for all Australians.
Thank you.
