C-BAND TO IP MIGRATION
How spectrum policy turned video distribution into an IP problem, and why the answer runs through NetActuate’s edge platform and NETINT’s video processing units.
The regulatory clock has run out
The FCC repurposed the 3.7 to 4.2 GHz band by clearing 3.7 to 3.98 GHz for flexible terrestrial use, establishing a guard band at 3.98 to 4.0 GHz, and repacking incumbent satellite operations into the upper 200 megahertz. The transition ran on an aggressive schedule: accelerated Phase I and Phase II deadlines in 2021 and 2023, with an ultimate deadline of December 5, 2025. All five eligible space station operators elected accelerated relocation and met their deadlines, which means the practical clearing finished ahead of the final date and 5G carriers are already operating in the cleared spectrum.
The squeeze is not over. In November 2025, the Commission adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR) that would make at least 100 megahertz, and as much as 180 megahertz, of the remaining 3.98 to 4.2 GHz band available for commercial wireless services, with a congressional mandate to auction the spectrum by July 4, 2027.
Operators who consolidated into 200 megahertz of satellite capacity may soon be working with roughly half of that. Anyone treating the December 2025 deadline as the end of the story is misreading the direction of travel. Satellite capacity in this band will keep shrinking, and IP distribution is the only durable landing zone.
That makes 2026 the execution year. The planning debates are over. Operators are finishing earth station work, redesigning backhaul, and standing up repeatable IP architectures across dozens of sites.
What IP distribution actually demands
Replacing a transponder is harder than it sounds, because a transponder bundles several functions that IP unbundles. Reach becomes routing. Reliability becomes failover engineering. Distribution becomes encoding, packaging, and delivery, each with its own cost curve.
The transport requirements look more like mission-critical networking than web delivery: high sensitivity to packet loss and route instability, deterministic failover behavior, 24×7 sustained throughput, and stable latency across a region. NetActuate’s C-band program documentation makes the same point, and it matches operational experience. A contribution feed that hiccups during a live event is not a degraded user experience; it is a breach of contract.
There is a second demand that gets less attention. Every signal that used to ride a transponder must now be encoded or transcoded somewhere in the IP path: channel origination, regional re-encodes, multi-destination distribution, disaster recovery copies. The encode layer becomes a permanent, always-on cost center that the satellite model never surfaced as a separate item. Where you place that capacity, and what hardware runs it, ends up driving both the budget and the architecture.
The infrastructure layer built for this transition
NetActuate, an edge infrastructure and network provider operating in more than 45 locations worldwide, has built an explicit C-band transition practice around this migration. The company operates as the fourth largest IPv4 and IPv6 network in the world, running one of the larger BGP Anycast footprints in the industry, and delivering infrastructure through Open Network Edge (ONE), an open source IaaS platform spanning public and private cloud, virtual machines, managed Kubernetes, bare metal, colocation, and storage.
For a C-band migration, three elements of that portfolio matter most. First, the footprint: more than 45 points of presence, many in carrier hotels with direct interconnects, which is exactly where regional aggregation and IP egress land after earth station consolidation. Second, the routing: BGP Anycast with engineered failover supports the deterministic behavior contribution that feeds require. Third, the standardization: ONE lets an operator define a site build once and repeat it across markets, which is the difference between a six-site pilot and a forty-site rollout.
An important commercial note is that NetActuate is positioned as infrastructure only. For broadcasters and service providers that already own an application stack, encoding relationships, or a branded service, that lane discipline removes an adoption risk the hyperscale clouds cannot.
Encoding economics at the edge
Here is where many transition architectures stumble. Teams design the network, select the sites, and then default to software encoding on CPUs because it is familiar. In a centralized data center, CPU encoding is expensive. HEVC can be 2-4x more compute intensive than H.264, and AV1 is 3-5x more intensive than HEVC, depending on encoding parameters, and quality targets, CPU encoding is uneconomical for many services and platforms.
Across a distributed edge footprint, it is frequently a blocker, because every site has a fixed power and rack budget, and software encoding of modern codecs consumes both at a brutal rate. Multiply a CPU transcode farm across ten or twenty points of presence and the inefficiency compounds with the site count.
This is the problem NETINT was founded to solve with Video Processing Units (VPUs), and it is why the NETINT and NetActuate partnership is the piece that completes the stack.
VPUs are the workflow enabler
NETINT Technologies created the video processing unit category and won the 2024 Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for the design and deployment of efficient hardware video accelerators for cloud. More than 200,000 NETINT VPUs have shipped to date, and encoded over one trillion minutes of video for some of the world’s largest streaming services and platforms.
The Quadra T1A, now deployed across NetActuate’s platform, is built around a single Codensity G5 ASIC. It encodes AV1, HEVC, and H.264 up to 8K resolution with 10-bit HDR, and delivers 32 simultaneous 1080p30 streams, eight 4Kp30 streams, or two 8Kp30 streams per card, while drawing just 20 watts. Just imagine the savings that will result from encoding 320 FHD streams in AV1, HEVC and H.264 on a single 1RU server.
The Quadra T1A also supports CEA-708 closed captioning, HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG, forced IDR insertion, sub-frame latency, and an 18 TOPS AI engine for tasks such as region-of-interest encoding. Customer and in-house evaluations show roughly 10x the stream density with 80 percent less energy consumption than CPU-based processing and total cost of ownership improvements up to 40x.
Quadra T1A VPUs are now a self-service accelerator option across NetActuate’s global platform: choose a location, select firmware, configure a VM, attach a VPU through secure passthrough, and run FFmpeg, Gstreamer, or NETINT’s Bitstream media processing pipelines on dedicated hardware within minutes.
Packages range from 4 to 12 vCPUs with one or two VPUs, and introductory pricing starts at $0.237 per hour, about $173 per month, for a VPU-enabled, Intel-based VM, which NetActuate describes as the lowest sustained-usage price in the industry. Higher density Quadra T2A configurations are available for larger rollouts as are AMD EPYC-based VMs. Qualified prospects can leverage a no-cost Proof of Concept (POC) to run deployment pilots.
The bottom line
The C-band transition is a forcing function, not a one-time event. The FCC removed the spectrum and may remove more by 2027. NetActuate supplies the global footprint, contribution-grade routing, and repeatable site architecture the replacement workflows require. NETINT VPUs supply the encode density and power efficiency that make those workflows affordable to run around the clock across a distributed footprint. Operators finalizing modernization plans looking for solutions beyond the transponder, should be validating this stack now.
