Published: August 18, 2026
MONROVIA – Liberia will have a licensing regime for satellite communications for the first time when the Liberia Telecommunications Authority signs its Satellite Communications Guidelines on Wednesday, setting the terms on which global operators including Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and Amazon Kuiper may sell capacity and services into the country and ending the absence of a dedicated rulebook for an industry now reaching Liberian users directly from orbit.
The Guidelines emerge from an eight-month public consultation in which the regulator revised its own draft repeatedly in response to industry objections, lifting notice requirements the operators called impractical, dropping documentation demands they said were disproportionate, reassigning obligations to the parties that could actually meet them and substantially reducing the fees initially proposed for satellite direct-to-device service.
At the core of the framework is a separation between the space segment and the earth segment. Satellite network operators hold landing rights authorizing their systems over Liberia, while the provision of service to customers requires a separate LTA-issued satellite communications license. The regulator made that division explicit during the consultation, revising Section 2.3 to state that possession of landing rights does not by itself authorize anyone to provide satellite services in Liberia. Mobile network operators wishing to use satellite capacity, including direct-to-device, may obtain the appropriate satellite license themselves or contract with an LTA-licensed satellite service provider.
The process ran under Part III, Section 11(4) of the Telecommunications Act of 2007 and the Consultation Process Guidelines of 2009. The LTA published its consultation document on Feb. 23, 2026, inviting written submissions by March 9, and convened forums with licensed operators on March 5 and again on May 29. It published its responses to the first round of written comments on April 3 and reopened the window to April 8. On June 8, after what the report describes as extensive revision of the draft, the authority extended the consultation again to June 19.
Those invited to take part included the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, mobile network operators, infrastructure operators and internet service providers, alongside Starlink Liberia, Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, Intelsat and SES, Inmarsat and Viasat, Avanti Communications, Arabsat and Yahsat. Comments were anonymized in the published report.
Several of the industry’s requests were granted outright. The requirement that satellite network operators give seven business days’ written notice before earth stations in motion entered Liberian territory has been lifted, after operators argued it was unworkable given the movement of aircraft, ships and vehicles. In its place, operators without Liberian landing rights will file a one-time general notice disclosing the operating frequencies and orbital positions of the satellite systems serving those terminals, updated whenever there is a material change, which the LTA says it needs to protect licensed services from harmful interference.
The application file has also been trimmed. Applicants for landing rights will no longer have to produce certified copies of foreign telecommunications licenses held by affiliates with more than five percent shareholding, a requirement operators said caused delays outside their control and risked exposing confidential information. Where no formal license exists in a home jurisdiction, the authority will now accept certificates, authorizations or equivalent documents. Customer-facing obligations that the draft had placed on network operators have been moved to licensed service providers, and the twelve-month transitional period has been confined to existing LTA-licensed satellite services and their associated networks, with new entrants required to comply in full from the moment the Guidelines take effect.
On three points the regulator held its ground and explained why. Landing rights for non-geostationary systems remain at five years against the ten years granted to geostationary operators, a gap the LTA attributes to the pace of change in constellation technology, with Section 8 of the landing rights authorization offering compliant operators a defined route to renewal. The restriction limiting authorized network operators to supplying capacity to licensed service providers stays, which the authority frames as keeping satellite and terrestrial providers on comparable regulatory terms in a market where their services increasingly compete. And landing rights fees remain as proposed, on the reasoning that they are cost-based charges recovering the expense of processing applications and managing shared use of national radio frequencies.
The fee question was sharpest around direct-to-device. Operators objected to an initial package of a US$250,000 license fee, a nine percent levy, three percent of annual gross revenue and a half percent universal access contribution as disproportionate to comparable service categories. The LTA responded that those figures had already been substantially reduced in the revised draft it published for the extended consultation.
With the signing, the authority will adopt and publish the Guidelines together with an Order giving them effect and establishing the transitional arrangements for licensed satellite services already operating.
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