where they currently reside. Transition away from satellite In 2015, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting commissioned the help of Cognizant Technology Solutions to come up with a new cost-effective solution to improve the Public Television Interconnection System; the report was released in November 2015. Cognizant's recommendation was "that the system adopt a single interconnection system that is cloud-based, using mainly the public internet and an ecosystem of centralized master control service providers". This interconnection system is known as sIX ("six"), the official meaning being "Service Interconnection," according to Vigor Systems Inc., the company charged with developing and deploying the new interconnection system. It also represents the sixth major update to the interconnection system, the last occurring in 2005. Testing of sIX commenced in 2018. With initial tests proving successful, PBS discontinued their NRT (non-real-time) file-based transponder on AMC-21 in 2019. The goal is to move all linear-fed content to sIX in the near future. The rollout of sIX is occurring in several phases. Phase 1 involved phasing out the NRT file-based Ku-band transponder. Phase 2 began in 2020 and is currently ongoing, which according to a May 2021 report from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, "considers future options for the delivery of linear and live content." The report says that later stages will be "defined as business and technology needs evolve." The original plan was to transition the satellite feeds to the IEEE C-band spectrum starting in March 2016. This transition never occurred, and the plan was later abandoned. In the last few years, PBS has begun to phase out a few of their satellite feeds. In 2016, PBS discontinued the SD01 Ku-band feed on AMC-21. On March 4, 2019, PBS's C-Band feed on SES 3 (103°W) was discontinued. As mentioned previously, PBS discontinued their NRT file-based transponder on AMC-21 in 2019. On November 13, 2019, PBS discontinued their SD07 Ku-band feed on AMC-21, which was uplinked from SCETV in Columbia, South Carolina. According to KNME (New Mexico PBS), "99% of Public Television Stations have successfully implemented sIX functionality". PBS, however, has expressed that they will continue to lease transponder space for live and near-live programs, such as PBS NewsHour; PBS will also continue to lease transponder space in the event their sIX system suddenly fails or experiences an outage. According to the website for the National Educational Telecommunications Association, or NETA, new programs distributed by NETA will no longer