AbstractThis paper aims at improvement of the interbeam connectivity of the multibeam satellite for fixed satellite communications under frequency division multiple access (FDMA) operation and proposes the subchannel switched FDMA (SS/FDMA) system, which is realized by installing the filter matrix on‐board the satellite. In the proposed system, each transponder is used to realize multiple interbeam connections and the interbeam connectivity is improved greatly compared to the traditional system. A satellite network among multiple beams can be constructed efficiently.A method is shown in this paper to determine the transmission parameters which maximize the system capacity of the multibeam satellite network and minimize the average transmission equivalent isotopically radiated power (e.i.r.p.) for one carrier. Example calculations are shown for the power‐limited and band‐limited systems. In the band‐limited system, the number of subchannels and the ratio of band widths of the subchannels are important parameters.From such a viewpoint, a method is shown which determines the number of subchannels when the bandwidth ratio of the subchannels is specified. An example calculation is shown taking into account uniform and nonuniform traffic distribution patterns.