In order to prevent potential interference that 5G could cause to fixed satellite service stations, ARCEP specified, on Friday, the conditions allowing the coexistence of these technologies.
A ministerial decree published in Official newspaper this Friday, September 16 finally confirms the decision taken by ARCEP four months ago. On May 19, the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Posts and Press Distribution specified the conditions allowing coexistence between 5G networks in the 3.5 – 3.8 GHz band and earth stations in the fixed satellite service (or FSS) in the 3.8 GHz band for metropolitan France. What put an end to this technological conflict.
Ground stations qualified according to their impact on the deployment of 5G
Even if users of the 3.4 – 3.8 GHz frequency band complied with the technical conditions laid down by the European Union, base stations in mobile networks were liable to cause harmful interference to earth stations in the fixed service by satellite operating in the neighboring band 3.8 – 4.2 GHz.
ARCEP therefore had to specify the technical conditions that operators must respect, in order to protect existing and future earth stations in neighboring bands. One of them is the limitation of the transmission power. But each station is qualified according to its impact on the deployment of 5G in the 3.5 – 3.8 GHz band, namely “strong” or “moderate” impact.
FSS stations with a strong impact suggest that the protection criterion be calculated by taking into account the exact characteristics of the existing stations, such as elevation, noise temperature and antenna pattern; while a moderate impact risk causes the characteristics of a generic station directed towards all possible points of the geostationary arc to be taken into account.
The issuance of authorizations will also depend on the impacts of the stations
ARCEP has therefore decided that in the event that an earth station must be requalified as a high impact station, the guarantees of protection of current authorizations will be maintained identically, ie 5 years. ” This brings visibility to earth station operators “, justifies the regulator. If the authorization to use the frequencies ends before the expiry of the 5-year period, the guarantees will be maintained for 5 years. If it ends after the expiry of the period, they will be maintained until the authorization expires.
Regarding the issuance of new authorizations for the use of frequencies, the regulator recalls that for existing and future earth stations, it will therefore depend on their degree of impact on the deployment of 5G. All this will make it possible to properly deploy 5G networks in the 3.4 – 3.8 GHz band.
In the event of a strong impact, authorizations will be issued if the stations do not create additional protection constraints in terms of the electric field limits to be respected and/or the duration of the protection. If the impact is moderate, the authorizations will be issued with technical conditions, if and only if the 5G sites already deployed do not require any significant modification to comply with these same technical protection conditions.
Source : ARCEP
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