Governments discovered a miracle product. It is invisible, it cannot be shipped offshore, it makes no mess on the carpet, and when you slice it into rectangles with numbers on them, companies line up to buy those rectangles as if they were beachfront villas. The press calls it spectrum. Treasury calls it revenue that arrives on time. Operators call it the difference between being a utility and being a growth story, as long as nobody asks about debt. Vendors call it the reason their catalogs need two more pages. The public calls it bars on a phone, until the bill arrives, which is when it becomes a service fee for progress.

Everyone swears the auctions are about efficient allocation. That is adorable. The auctions are about keeping score in a game where the scoreboard sells tickets. Whoever buys the most air gets to brag about national leadership, then files a request to relax a coverage obligation because a mountain has the audacity to be tall.

The same players then unveil a campaign called connecting everyone, right after quietly retiring the plan to connect the part of everyone that lives beyond profitable backhaul. If you listen closely, the word refarm sounds like a tractor, which is convenient because it plows through people who used to occupy those frequencies. Theaters and schools pretend to be surprised every time and then hold bake sales for new microphones. Progress tastes like brownies, apparently.

Technical debates act as camouflage. One group insists that mid-band is pure gold, another group insists that millimeter wave is a stadium dream that somehow also powers cities, a third group insists that sharing is the future because software can do anything, especially if you ignore physics. Everyone is right in just enough contexts to keep the argument going for another budget cycle. Meanwhile satellites are learning the old cellular trick. Show up with universal coverage and a smile, then negotiate yourself into the rules so deeply that nobody remembers what the rules looked like before you arrived. If you can route text from orbit, you can probably route a policy from orbit too.

Cross-border D2D-NTN

Who must kiss the ring of incumbents, and what happens when the paperwork clock runs out.

Space is finally fixing your dead zones, just as long as your dead zones are patriotic. The satellites can see half a continent, but their lawyers can only see national borders, lease terms, and routing tables. If you thought a global beam meant global service, that is adorable. The radio has to ask permission every time it crosses a line on a paper map. Regulators call this responsible stewardship. Operators call it Tuesday. Customers call it a coverage checker that keeps saying coming soon.

In America, the new rules say satellites may speak in mobile bands if they borrow the voice of the licensed carrier. You lease the channel across the whole area, then you can whisper to handsets that think the sky is just a very tall cell tower. It is efficient if you like neat models, and it is convenient if you are the incumbent holding the keys. The United States chopped itself into neat geographic blocks just to make the paperwork easier. It did not make your hike any shorter.

The UK looked around, nodded, and wrote a version with British weather. Work with the national licensee for the band. Keep to the mainland and territorial seas. Mind the neighbors. Do not transmit without permission because that is a crime. Everyone smiles. The satellites learn to color inside the lines. The maps look very professional. Engineers spend their weekends turning coverage off at imaginary fences so that diplomacy does not spill coffee on Monday.

You can try the satellite bands instead, where the sky has its own spectrum. That helps, because you are no longer borrowing clothes from the terrestrial crowd. But the immigration rules still apply. Every country wants its landing rights, its safety routing, its device approvals. Apple’s satellite features march through the world like a parade with gaps where the marching band is not invited. You can admire the choreography, just do not ask why the trumpets stopped at the border.

The carrier theater is lively. One camp says they partnered with a constellation and now own the wilderness. Another camp points at a different constellation and says the same thing. Investors hear words like ubiquitous and global, then later learn that ubiquitous means wherever our leases are current and global means wherever the regulator did not say no. AST SpaceMobile does the sensible thing and bargains with everybody, while also picking up satellite band rights so there is a second path when a mobile license rolls over. The strategy looks like redundancy and reads like survival.

What about cross-border travel. The marketing image shows a hiker roaming from valley to valley while texts ride a peaceful beam across the horizon. The operations image shows a control system trimming power at a political boundary because the beam is not allowed in the next jurisdiction without a chaperone. The roaming analogy helps. You do not just connect overseas because physics says so. You connect because carriers shook hands and regulators did not frown. Starlink and T-Mobile sell that handshake as part of the brand now, which is honest and also a reminder that satellites are guests in the mobile house.

And when the license expires. This is my favorite part. The constellation keeps circling the planet with solar panels politely collecting daylight. The lawful right to talk in a given mobile band ends at midnight on the license expiration unless the lease updates. The satellite hears the handset perfectly. The operator hears the regulator even more perfectly. Service pauses, or shifts to an authorized band, or waits for the new licensee to pick up the pen. You can be a marvel of engineering and still be out of policy. The future belongs to whoever can administratively outlast the orbit.

The punchline is not that D2D will fail. It will work in more places every quarter. The punchline is that cross-border success comes from paperwork choreography that looks suspiciously like terrestrial roaming with extra steps. Negotiate with incumbents where you must. Use satellite bands where you can. Fence your beams at the edge of a country even though the photons do not care. Call it innovation. Call it progress. Just remember the real product is not only bandwidth. The real product is permission.

What comes after spectrum?

Air, Sunshine? Air is already a business model if you wrap it in the word emissions or if you live in a city where air rights sold for more than your entire block. Light is a policy sandbox every time a city approves or rejects a glass tower that steals a neighbor’s afternoon. Sun rays come with cheerful press releases about solar rooftops, plus spreadsheets about shading limits that look suspiciously like permit markets waiting to happen.

If a thousand startups suddenly need visible light channels for indoor networks, please act shocked when a licensing scheme appears, complete with a fairness narrative and a children’s hospital photo in the slide deck. The formula is simple. Find a shared medium, declare it strategic, monetise the coordination problem, then please do not ask why the cheapest capacity gain, which is better coordination, keeps getting priced as if only new parcels can solve it.

In this brave new wireless world, the biggest risk is not running out of spectrum. The biggest risk is running out of institutional patience for sharing. Auctions feel clean and decisive, like pulling a lever. Sharing feels messy and contingent, like running a city. Yet cities are where the capacity crunch actually lives, and cities run on messy coordination every day without collapsing. The future we keep promising involves networks that sense, adapt, and cooperate. If policy cannot learn the same habits, the next round of spectrum wars will look exactly like the last one, just with more zeros and better stage lighting.