Washington — The satcom market is entering a new phase of competition. After Starlink’s astronomic rise to 4.6 million users and an estimated $8.1 billion in 2024 revenue, incumbents are answering the challenge with multi-orbit, multi-network strategies.
Following a series of mega-mergers, a new generation of satcom giants is emerging with tri-orbit capabilities, flexible architectures and an alphabet soup of Ka-, Ku-, C-, S- and X-band spectrum. The question is how incumbents can use this new phase of disruption to secure their place in a Starlink, NGSO-dominated future.
The Multi-Orbit Advantage
While proliferated LEOs are launched like confetti, new orders for GEOs have lagged over the past decade. Industry analysts expect that trend will continue, especially with NGSOs like Starlink, Kuiper and China’s Thousand Sails (aka Qianfan) projected to supply the vast majority of high-throughput satellite capacity into the 2030s.
Yet, in the world of critical communications, it’s not an either-or choice between LEO or GEO. Many end users demand combined, resilient capabilities, as opposed to depending on a single provider.
“You should never be fully reliant on just one service, one capability,” said Eutelsat America Corp. and OneWeb Technologies (EACOWT) President and CEO Ian Canning in a recent Satellite 2025 panel discussion on multi-orbit broadband services.
Eutelsat, which expanded its fleet to more than 600 satellites through its merger with OneWeb, saw its stock soar in early March amid public discussion of a European alternative to the U.S.-based Starlink in the Ukraine conflict. Ukraine currently has more than 42,000 Starlink terminals providing critical communications to its military, hospitals, businesses and aid organizations.
“We see—and I think that it’s picked up in the last couple of weeks—a very, very, very strong governmental demand across all of the non-U.S. that says, ‘I guess we kind of need to have multiple solutions,’” noted Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke. She described the Paris-based operator as “the only alternative” to American or Chinese global constellations.
While Eutelsat-OneWeb’s LEO satellite count is an order of magnitude smaller than Starlink’s, the multi-orbit operator offers guaranteed network availability and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Providing end-to-end service with network guarantees is one of the ways multi-orbit operators distinguish themselves from Starlink’s best-effort service. Incumbents have historically had an advantage over Starlink in offering Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with up to five nines availability or 99.999% uptime with performance guarantees. However, Starlink recently announced the release of a 99.9% priority data SLA in mobility markets starting in April.
Panelists discuss multi-orbit partnerships in a LEO-dominated world at Satellite in Washington, D.C., March 11, 2025. (Source: Kratos)
From Selling Bandwidth to a Managed Service Provider
Starlink’s entry into the commercial B2C satellite broadband market with inexpensive, plug-and-play user terminals and an abundance of on-orbit capacity was a game-changer. While few are trying to compete head-to-head in B2C satellite broadband, the disruption was a catalyst for incumbents to rethink their relationship to the end user. Five years after Starlink made its commercial debut, legacy operators are leaning in to their multi-orbit advantage with managed service or network-as-a-service (NaaS) models. In this model, an operator handles end-to-end connectivity services, including traffic management and network optimization. A managed service that shields the customer from the complexity of running their own satellite infrastructure is particularly valuable to large enterprises such as telcos, mobile network operators (MNOs) and the mobility sector.
During a recent discussion of multi-orbit partnerships, Intelsat CCO Mike DeMarco was explicit, noting that Intelsat has “moved from being a satellite operator and selling bandwidth, to now being a managed service provider.”
Following up on this comment, Intelsat SVP of Media, Mobility and Networks Jean-Philippe Gillet later elaborated on the significance of a managed service provider (MSP) role. “I’m a great believer that the solution that our customers are looking for is not a single orbit. It is not one size fits all,” he said in response to a question from Constellations. “It’s about how you combine and how you have a smart edge that is really helping you move traffic for the right orbit based on the price, based on the application and the services that are required by the customer.”
Intelsat has inked several deals in aero and maritime for managed, end-to-end connectivity solutions. SES has also adopted the MSP approach in those verticals, suggesting a harmony of interests in the SES-Intelsat acquisition.
Telesat, the long-time GEO operator which will begin launching its Lightspeed LEO constellation in mid-2026, has operated as an MSP in Canada for years. “We’re a carriers’ carrier,” explained Glenn Katz, CCO of Telesat. The company has been a forerunner in simplifying how terrestrial connectivity providers consume satellite bandwidth. Along with Intelsat, Telesat is one of the first operators to comply with MEF 3.0 standards, enabling it to provide Carrier Ethernet over satellite that looks like a typical terrestrial Layer 2 data link. “We have to be able to create the environment so that the MNOs, the telcos, the other service providers from whatever industry or vertical … can utilize our network,” Katz said. “The challenge is how to do that efficiently.”
Ahead of the launch of Lightspeed, Telesat has already secured a multi-year partnership with global telecommunications leader Orange, which will take advantage of its Carrier Ethernet services for mobile backhauling, crisis response and remote connectivity. The company also recently reached an agreement with Space Norway to support its multi-orbit strategy.
Gradually Gaining Ground
The multi-orbit panel at Satellite 2025 identified the ground segment as a going concern for realizing the full potential of multi-orbit networks. While hopeful about the future, operators gave relatively low marks to multi-orbit terminals, citing room for improvement in capability, price and power consumption. Similarly, multi-orbit operators see more progress needed at the gateway. According to Viasat Government CTO Steve Gizinski, bringing together disparate signals with different latencies and performance characteristics into a single software-defined network remains a “big challenge.”
Part of solving the challenge in the ground segment is resolving the complexity of translating analog signals into digital, internet protocol-based networks. “It used to be the rocket was the problem … and that got resolved eventually. Then the RF and the satellite were the hard part. I’d say today, the hard part, or the point of focus, to be clear, is on the IP side,” said Gizinski.
Eutelsat’s Canning agreed that there are “many ways of skinning a skin a cat” in the IP world, but the complexity of that underlying IP network is the “focus of the managed service delivered to the customer.”
Today, organizations like the Digital IF Interoperability Consortium (DIFI) are tackling one of the fundamental issues of digitizing the ground segment by designing a protocol to replace L-band Intermediate Frequency (IF) transport with IP-based transport. Earlier this month, DIFI announced the completion of its latest interoperability standard and launched a certification program to support the growth of an interoperable, digital ground ecosystem.
Sovereignty Driving Demand
Even as Starlink boasts near-global coverage, there are still questions about its reach, particularly at a time when government users are wary of relying on a single provider. The European Union’s IRIS² program, Australia’s JP 9102 and the Saudi sovereign wealth-funded Neo Space Group are just a few examples of countries or regions investing significantly in sovereign space capabilities. While this trend is not new, industry insiders say recent events have injected urgency into government demand for diverse sources of satellite connectivity.
Declan Ganley, CEO of Rivada Space Networks, which is developing an interconnected LEO Outernet, cited “new demand” for secure data transmission in a changing global environment. “We have seen a flurry of activity over recent weeks,” he told an audience at Satellite. “There’s an awareness that there needs to be multiple alternatives.” He stressed the importance of ensuring data sovereignty and data residency are “not subject to the high winds of political change and the disruptive times we are in.” Rivada is a strategic partner in enabling multi-orbit services for governments and enterprises.
Faced with geopolitical instability, market volatility and mixed signals from the world’s largest satcom consumer, the U.S. Department of Defense, multi-orbit multinationals still see a silver lining.
Intelsat CFO Toby O’Brien noted that diversity is key. “Because of countries outside of the U.S. wanting to have a sovereign capability, because of the changes taking place, I think there will be opportunities—maybe even beyond what some of us may be thinking today—to further grow the global part of our business as well.”
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