The service operates on L-band carriers assigned in blocks to areas of coverage referred to as "spotbeams", which are Thuraya’s equivalent to cells or service areas. In L-band, 34 MHz of bandwidth from 1.525 GHz to 1.559 GHz is assigned for downlink (space-to-earth) communication, while the uplink (earth-to-space) operates between 1.6265 GHz and 1.6605 GHz. Uplink and downlink channels are 1087 paired carrier frequencies, on a raster of 31.25 kHz. A Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) time slot architecture is employed which allocates a carrier in timeslots of a fixed length.