If you are reading this outside the United States, the natural response is that an American docket is an American problem. That response is wrong, and the reason comes down to four frequencies written into a European standard.

What is actually being proposed

NextNav is a US company that holds Multilateration Location and Monitoring Service licences in the 900 MHz band and sells terrestrial positioning, navigation and timing services. In April 2024 it petitioned the Federal Communications Commission, the US telecoms regulator, to reconfigure the band around a nationwide 5G network that would serve as a terrestrial complement to GPS.

The shape of the proposal is simple enough to state. A 5 MHz uplink at 902 to 907 MHz. A 10 MHz downlink at 918 to 928 MHz. Everything else that uses the band today compressed into the 11 MHz that remains at 907 to 918 MHz. NextNav would exchange its existing licences for a single nationwide 15 MHz flexible-use licence.

Today that band is unlicensed and shared under Part 15 of the FCC’s rules. RAIN RFID readers sit in it, and so do LoRaWAN and Wi-SUN networks, Z-Wave home devices, electricity and gas meters, road tolling systems, alarm and security equipment, and amateur radio operators on a secondary basis. None of them holds a licence and none of them has priority over the others. Twenty-six megahertz of shared spectrum would become eleven.

The matter sits before the FCC under dockets RM-11989, WT 24-240 and WT 25-110.

Why this reaches well past America

Europe runs UHF RFID in two bands. The long-established lower band at 865 to 868 MHz, and an upper band at 915 to 921 MHz that European countries opened more recently.

The upper band is defined in ETSI EN 302 208, the European standard for RFID equipment in these frequencies. It specifies four high power interrogator channels, each 400 kHz wide, at 916.3, 917.5, 918.7 and 919.9 MHz, with power up to 4 W ERP.

Two of those four channels, 918.7 and 919.9 MHz, fall inside the 918 to 928 MHz slice NextNav proposes to hold exclusively in the United States.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean, because the point is easily overstated. NextNav’s petition is a United States matter and reaches no further. European spectrum is set by CEPT and national regulators, and nothing in this proceeding touches it. A reader operating on 918.7 MHz in Rotterdam or Rochdale would carry on exactly as before. The risk is not that anyone takes European frequencies away. It is divergence: the prospect of the top third of the American band behaving in a fundamentally different way from the same frequencies everywhere else.

Europe did not arrive at that band by accident. It took years of technical study by CEPT, the body through which European administrations coordinate spectrum, and it was given effect by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1538, which applied from 1 February 2019. The stated purpose was harmonisation with North America.

The RAIN Alliance calls 915 to 921 MHz the global overlap zone and makes the commercial case plainly: a system designed for it can be manufactured once and deployed across most of the world without retesting, recertification or hardware redesign. The Alliance also credits the upper band with up to 40% more read range and roughly double the communication speed compared with the European lower band. More than 25 European countries have made it available. Decathlon, the French sporting goods retailer and a speaker at the Madrid conference, has committed to deploying it across thousands of stores.

Nor is this only a European question. Japan runs 916 to 921 MHz, South Korea 917 to 923.5 MHz, China 920 to 925 MHz, Australia 918 to 926 MHz, and Brazil 902 to 907.5 MHz together with 915 to 928 MHz. One industry survey found that 55 of the 81 countries whose status was known offered RAIN reader channels somewhere within 902 to 928 MHz.

The slice at issue is therefore not a quiet corner of an American band. It is the part of the radio spectrum the rest of the world has spent the better part of fifteen years converging on.

The arithmetic that decides what happens to readers

The detail that matters most to anyone running RFID has had very little attention, and it is a question of channel counting.

Under 47 CFR 15.247, the FCC rule that governs frequency hopping in this band, a system in 902 to 928 MHz may transmit at 1 W only if it hops across at least 50 channels. A system using fewer than 50 but at least 25 channels is held to 0.25 W. Below 25 channels there is no allowance at all under that rule. US readers today typically hop across 50 channels spaced 500 kHz apart, which the full 26 MHz comfortably supports.

Compress the shared allocation to 11 MHz and that stops working. At 500 kHz spacing, 11 MHz yields 22 channels, which is below even the 25 channel floor. Keeping 50 channels inside 11 MHz means bringing channel spacing down to roughly 220 kHz, and with it the bandwidth of each hopping channel.

That is not a firmware update. Narrower channels mean lower data rates, which means slower reads, and slower reads bite hardest in dense deployments with many readers and many tags in close proximity, which is precisely where RFID is already most difficult. Equipment designed and certified around 500 kHz channels does not simply move. Neither NextNav nor the opposing coalition has set out what would happen to the installed base, and it is the question every operator should be asking.

The case NextNav makes

The starting point of NextNav’s argument is not in serious dispute. GPS is a weak signal from a long way away, it can be jammed and spoofed, and a great deal of modern infrastructure depends on it for timing as much as for position. Building a terrestrial layer beneath it is a legitimate goal, and the company frames its proposal as a system-of-systems approach rather than a replacement.

NextNav argues that its plan achieves this through the market rather than through public spending, at no cost to taxpayers. It commissioned the Brattle Group, an economic consultancy, which put the value of a terrestrial GPS backup at $14.6bn and assessed the cost to unlicensed devices as close to zero. The company has said it would take financial responsibility for coexistence testing with affected licensed users such as railways and tolling operators.

On RFID specifically, NextNav has not simply asserted that coexistence works. In May 2026 it ran a rooftop demonstration in San Jose, California, involving live RFID equipment, with RKF Engineering Solutions concurring on the methodology. Its broader position on unlicensed users is one that deserves to be stated fairly: Part 15 devices are built to tolerate interference and to share, they enjoy no protection today, and the band has never been anyone’s private property.

The case against

The objections fall into two groups, and they are not equally strong.

The economic case is the noisier one and the harder to pin down. The SpecTech Alliance puts the cost to American business at up to $7bn. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents US investor-owned electricity companies, has estimated up to $4bn for each utility spread across a ten to fifteen year replacement cycle, and utility interests collectively have put the figure at $100bn or more. Device makers including Itron, Landis+Gyr and ecobee have said that replacing just 10% of affected equipment would cost around $10bn.

These numbers range across more than an order of magnitude, and every one of them, including NextNav’s, was produced by a party with a direct commercial interest in the outcome. They should be read as advocacy rather than as measurement.

The technical case is stronger because it is checkable. The Security Industry Association has filed an interference impact study. The RAIN Alliance’s concern is the one set out above: the band is the foundation of a global supply chain in retail, healthcare, logistics and manufacturing, and the proposal lands on the part of it that the world has standardised around. More than 2,000 comments have been filed in the proceeding, and opposition in the record is close to unanimous.

The same problem, answered a different way

Here is the part of this story that is genuinely useful to a reader outside the United States, because Europe faces the same threat in a sharper form and has reached a different answer.

Since 2022, sustained GNSS jamming and spoofing has been recorded across the Baltic Sea region, attributed by the affected states to sources in Russia and Belarus. Thirteen EU member states have formally demanded action. Nobody in Europe needs persuading that satellite navigation is fragile.

Europe’s response has been layered rather than structural. Authentication built into Galileo, the EU’s satellite navigation system, so that receivers can detect spoofed signals. Encrypted signals for government users. An interference detection and localisation service. Celeste, a European Space Agency demonstrator testing positioning from low Earth orbit, where signals arrive stronger. Mitigation at the receiver itself. ENTSO-E, the association of European electricity transmission operators, has been drafting a PNT resilience standard for the power sector.

Nor, as it happens, does NextNav’s own international business depend on doing so. Its TerraPoiNT positioning network operates on 855 to 860 MHz in Japan rather than at 900 MHz, and NextNav France, the arm built on its 2022 acquisition of the French positioning company Nestwave, has been developing the system to work from LTE and 5G signals. The company therefore already runs on different spectrum in different jurisdictions, and outside the United States its stated direction is to use the mobile bands that exist rather than to seek a band of its own. That does not invalidate the American petition, and there are real differences between the markets. But it does complicate the argument that this particular reconfiguration is the necessary route to resilient positioning.

What Europe has not done is reallocate a shared band to a single licensed operator. That is an observation rather than a verdict, and the two jurisdictions are not obliged to agree. But it does reframe the question. If the case for NextNav’s plan rests on the fragility of GPS, it is worth noting that the region with the most acute GNSS interference problem in the world has concluded that the answer lies in better signals, better receivers and orbital diversity, not in clearing spectrum.

Where it stands

Despite the weight of opposition in the record, the proposal is advancing. In March 2026 the FCC sent a draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to the White House Office of Management and Budget for interagency review, a step that precedes a formal rulemaking. The proceeding has also been linked to a US executive order on positioning, navigation and timing resilience, and FCC chairman Brendan Carr has spoken publicly about GPS vulnerability.

That is the fact worth sitting with. More than 2,000 comments, eighteen months of technical and economic argument, near-unanimous opposition from the industries that use the band, and the proposal is still moving. It is being weighed as national security policy, and in that frame a comment count is not the deciding input.

Nothing has been decided. A draft NPRM is a proposal to propose, not a rule, and the comment cycle that would follow is where the technical detail would finally be tested. But anyone assuming this dies quietly in the record is reading it wrong.

What this means if you are specifying equipment

Readers bought now will be in the field well into the 2030s. Three things follow.

If you deploy in the United States, the question to put to your vendor is what their roadmap looks like if the usable band narrows to 907 to 918 MHz, and specifically whether current hardware can be recertified for narrower hopping channels or whether it becomes a replacement. Get the answer in writing.

If you deploy in Europe or Asia-Pacific, the immediate risk is not to your own operation, because your regulator is not doing this. The risk is to the economics of the equipment you buy. Global harmonisation in the 915 to 921 MHz overlap is why a reader can be built once and sold everywhere, and the moment the US upper band behaves differently from everyone else’s, that advantage starts to erode for all of us.

And if you operate across both, which most large deployments now do, the harmonisation that made a single hardware platform viable is the thing actually at stake. That is worth more than any of the cost figures being traded in the filings.

RFID News will report from RAIN in Action in Madrid from 29 September to 1 October 2026, where the conference agenda includes a session on radio regulations. We will follow this proceeding as it develops. For more on where the technology is heading, see our interview with Aileen Ryan of the RAIN Alliance, and our continuing coverage of RAIN RFID.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.