The proposal expected to be announced on Wednesday would leave Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper able to bid only for the remaining third of the bloc’s 2 GHz mobile-satellite band.
The European Commission is preparing to reserve two-thirds of the bloc’s future mobile-satellite-services spectrum for European operators, leaving Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and other non-EU companies able to bid only for the remaining third, according to a Reuters report on Tuesday citing people familiar with the proposal.
Details are expected to be confirmed at a meeting of commissioners in Brussels on Wednesday, though the people cautioned that the structure could still shift before formal announcement.
The spectrum in question is the 2 GHz mobile-satellite-services (MSS) band, the 30 MHz pair of frequencies between 1980-2010 MHz and 2170-2200 MHz that allows mobile devices and vehicles to keep a connection in regions where terrestrial mobile networks cannot reach. The current licences, granted in 2009 to Inmarsat (now Viasat) and Solaris (now EchoStar), expire in May 2027.
The post-2027 allocation is what Wednesday’s decision concerns. EU member states, working through the Commission, control the band on a harmonised basis, which is what makes a single bloc-wide reservation possible at all.
The two-thirds split is the most pointed instrument of industrial policy the Commission has used in space to date. The reserved tranche would go to companies registered in the EU, with the United Kingdom and Norway also eligible to bid.
Brussels-bound for the European share, in practice, are the operators behind IRIS2, the 290-satellite multi-orbit constellation being built by the SpaceRISE consortium of SES, Eutelsat and Hispasat, with Airbus, Thales Alenia Space and OHB among the named contractors.
The 12-year IRIS2 concession was signed in December 2024 at an estimated cost of €10.5bn, of which around €6.5bn comes from public funds. Governmental services are due to begin operating in 2030.
The decision arrives inside a broader European push for what Brussels has begun calling “strategic autonomy” in space, motivated by two distinct but reinforcing concerns. The first is dependence on Starlink, made acute by Elon Musk’s public threats to withdraw service in Ukraine and his political alignment with Donald Trump’s second administration.
The second is a wider pattern of European frontier-tech policy in 2026, where Brussels has been progressively restricting US-firm access to strategically classified categories, from cybersecurity AI tools to cloud sovereignty to chip manufacturing equipment. The 2 GHz reservation is the most concrete signal yet that satellite communications is on the same list.
Starlink and Kuiper are not, on the proposed terms, locked out. The remaining one-third of the band would be open to non-EU bidders through a standard competitive selection.
Starlink’s direct-to-cell service, already commercially live in the US, would benefit from European MSS spectrum to operate at scale on the continent. Kuiper, still at the constellation-deployment stage, has been positioning for direct-to-device as a back-half-of-decade revenue line.
Viasat and EchoStar, the incumbent licensees, sit in an awkward position. Both are US-listed and would, on the proposed terms, fall into the non-EU third despite holding the spectrum today. Viasat has spent the past 18 months lobbying for an extension of its existing S-band spectrum, used predominantly to operate the European Aviation Network jointly with Deutsche Telekom.
Whether incumbents can secure European-tranche access via joint ventures or corporate-structure adjustments is a question Wednesday’s announcement is unlikely to fully resolve.
The 2 GHz band is too narrow to support a Starlink-scale service on its own. What it does provide is the harmonised, interference-protected, regulated layer mobile carriers want their direct-to-device traffic to ride on.
Reserving two-thirds of that layer for European firms compresses the addressable European market for Starlink and Kuiper to a one-third slice. The deeper effect is structural rather than total: Brussels is choosing to make European D2D services preferentially viable, not to make American ones impossible.
The Commission is expected to publish the formal proposal on Wednesday afternoon, Brussels time.
