I've been quietly fascinated, for a while now, by what's happening a few hundred kilometres above our heads.
My fascination isn't purely from a distance. For more than two years now I've had Starlink at my country house, after years of struggling with a DSL line and an LTE signal that were both sitting right at the edge of their coverage. The service I get from a constellation of satellites overhead is, frankly, better than I expected, and noticeably better than either of the ground options ever managed. When the connection you'd assumed was a compromise quietly turns out to be the best that house has ever had, you start paying attention to what's actually happening up there.
We are living through one of those rare moments when an entire industry reorganises itself in real time. A decade ago, satellite connectivity meant a handful of expensive geostationary birds and a clunky phone you'd only use on a mountain. Today there are thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, your ordinary smartphone can already exchange an emergency message with one of them, and a new constellation seems to be announced every few weeks. The cost of putting capacity into orbit has collapsed, and with it, the assumptions the whole telecom world was built on.
It's genuinely interesting, and I find myself looking at it from three angles at once. The technology, because the engineering is extraordinary. The impact on telecom operators, because this is where the abstract becomes concrete and someone's business model either grows or quietly erodes. And sovereignty, because connectivity has suddenly become a question of national power in a way it simply wasn't five years ago.
What strikes me most is how unbalanced the development is. It's dominated by US billionaire-backed private companies, mirrored by China's state-owned constellations built as national infrastructure, while Europe leans mostly on a regulatory framework rather than a strong technical base of its own. Europe's position is the awkward one: it depends on non-European technology either directly, with its flagship direct-to-device ambitions riding on the US-built satellites of AST SpaceMobile, or indirectly, relying on non-European launchers, SpaceX chief among them, to put its own “sovereign” constellations into orbit. Sovereign in governance, dependent in technology.
This post is the opening of a short series. I want to start by sharing how I've been making sense of the landscape, and why I think the most important way to read it isn't by technology or orbit, but by what it means for telcos.
A map organised around the thing that actually matters
The constellation world is usually drawn as a technology chart: who's in low orbit versus medium, who uses which frequency band, how many satellites each operator has filed for. That's useful, but it misses the point if what you care about is impact rather than hardware.
So I built the landscape map a different way, segmented by telco-strategic impact. The organising question for every player is simple: for a telecom operator, is this a partner, a competitor, or something in between? The same satellite can be either, depending entirely on the business model behind it.
That gives five segments:
- Direct-to-Device (D2D), also called Direct-to-Cell (D2C): constellations that talk straight to an unmodified device, no special hardware required. “Direct-to-Cell” usually refers to the narrower case of ordinary smartphones, while “Direct-to-Device” is the wider umbrella that also covers IoT sensors, trackers and vehicles. This is the highest-stakes segment, because it touches the operator's own customer in the operator's own pocket.
- LEO broadband: the terminal-based services (Starlink and its challengers) that compete with fixed lines in rural areas and offer backhaul in others.
- Legacy mobile-satellite operators: the incumbents repositioning, merging, or being absorbed.
- Government & defence: not telco-facing directly, but driving the spectrum, supply chain and talent that everything else depends on.
- Emerging startups & scaleups: a tier that barely existed eighteen months ago, several of them building wholesale capacity for telcos rather than competing with them.
The thing the map makes visible, which a technology chart hides, is that the strategic stance of each player is a choice of business model, not a fact of physics. A constellation that sells direct to consumers is a threat; the very same technology offered wholesale to operators is a gift. Holding that tension in view is the whole point.
A note on the map: it's built from publicly available information and my own reading of a fast-moving industry, so it won't be 100% precise, and some figures are estimates or simply aren't disclosed. If you spot something that's wrong, out of date, or missing, I'd genuinely welcome the correction. Comments are open.
What it actually means for a telecom operator
Strip away the excitement and the question for any operator is blunt: does this help me, or does it eat me? The honest answer is both, in four distinct ways.
1. Competition that may already be eroding revenue, quietly
The first impact is the uncomfortable one. Satellite connectivity now overlaps with services telcos have always considered theirs: rural broadband, coverage in the gaps, and increasingly messaging and voice direct to the handset. How much revenue is genuinely at risk is anyone's guess. Analysts and industry experts float estimates, often a single-to-low-double-digit slice over time, but honestly nobody knows yet, and I won't pretend I do either. What I'm far more confident about is the shape of it. It doesn't arrive as a dramatic cliff. It arrives as a customer who keeps their satellite-messaging plan when they switch carriers, a rural household that never needed your fixed line, a traveller who stops buying your roaming pass. Erosion at the edges is easy to miss until it isn't.
The takeaway isn't a number, it's a posture. Telcos have to react, and the smart ones will treat this as an opportunity rather than a threat to wait out. Because one thing is clear: Elon Musk did not pour this much capital and engineering into Starlink purely to be a polite wholesale supplier to mobile operators. SpaceX owns its own spectrum, runs its own consumer brand, and sets its own terms. The extraordinary R&D behind these constellations has its own purpose, and that purpose is not simply to help telcos. It's to compete with them as much as to serve them.
2. A genuine upgrade to coverage, reliability and resilience
The flip side is real and arrives faster. Satellite fills the holes terrestrial networks were never going to reach economically: the last valley, the open sea, the disaster zone where the towers just went down. For an operator, that's not only new addressable coverage; it's a resilience layer. A constellation can keep messaging and emergency traffic alive when a storm, a flood or a cyber-incident takes out the ground network. The most compelling version of this is safety-of-life: reliable backup for rescue and emergency services, and mass alerting that works precisely when the normal network has failed. This is the part of the story I find genuinely hopeful, connectivity as something that holds when everything else breaks.
And this isn't hypothetical, it's happening as I write. In February 2026 O2 in the UK switched on “O2 Satellite”, running on Starlink's Direct to Cell constellation over O2's own licensed mobile spectrum, lifting the operator's landmass coverage from 89% to 95% and aimed squarely at hikers, sailors and remote not-spots. Ukraine was first to switch it on: Kyivstar launched on the same Starlink constellation in late 2025 and passed three million users within weeks, keeping people connected near the front line and in areas where the towers had been destroyed. The service levels differ, O2 already carries data while Kyivstar is messaging-only for now, with voice and data due to follow in 2026, but the model is the same: an ordinary 4G phone, an operator's own subscribers, a satellite standing in for a missing tower. Two very different reasons for needing it, though. One is about reaching the last valley on a weekend hike; the other is about staying connected under fire.
And those two are just the visible edge of a wave. Orange is already running a similar service in France, through a different partner, Skylo, rather than Starlink. Spain has begun trials. Vodafone has signed with AST SpaceMobile through its Luxembourg-based European joint venture, and Deutsche Telekom has signed a ten-country Starlink deal, going live in 2028, that includes my own market here in Central Europe. The pattern worth noticing is that the partner isn't always the same: Starlink, Skylo and AST are all in the mix. Which brings me to the thread running underneath all of it: these are European operators, leaning on mostly non-European constellations to do it, which is precisely the tension I'll come back to.
3. Roaming and “always-covered” for people who need it
There's a quieter but lovely use case in here too: people for whom full, guaranteed coverage isn't a convenience but a safety requirement. The lone hiker, the offshore worker, the long-haul trucker, the sailor, the traveller crossing regions where no single network reaches. Satellite-backed roaming, coverage that simply doesn't drop when you leave the map, turns “no signal” from a fact of life into a solvable problem. For operators, it's a differentiated, premium reason to keep the customer relationship rather than lose it to a direct-to-consumer satellite brand.
This one is personal for me. I love adventure holidays, road trips and hiking, often in exactly the kinds of places where coverage thins out or disappears. Normally I don't bother with roaming and just pick up a local service when I arrive. But the day an operator can promise me full, reliable coverage backed by a LEO partner, coverage that holds in the valley or out on the trail where it actually matters for safety, that's the operator I'll choose. For people like me, satellite-backed reliability isn't a nice-to-have. It will be the deciding factor.
4. And underneath it all, sovereignty
The fourth impact is the one that reframes the other three, and it's where this series is heading next.
Connectivity has quietly become a question of sovereignty. The war in Ukraine showed that a single private operator can decide who gets access and who doesn't; China is building state-controlled mega-constellations as national infrastructure; and Europe has realised, somewhat abruptly, that its critical communications increasingly run on systems it neither owns nor governs. The response, which spans Europe's IRIS2 and GOVSATCOM programmes, sovereign-spectrum fights, and a wave of state-backed startups, is reshaping the rules beneath the whole industry.
Europe sits in the most awkward position of the three. It wants sovereign connectivity but doesn't yet have the home-grown technology to deliver it at the scale and speed the moment demands. That forces an uncomfortable choice: wait years for a genuinely European capability like IRIS2, which keeps slipping and looks modest on capacity, or get something working now by building on non-European technology and wrapping it in European governance.
The Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile venture, Satellite Connect Europe, is the clearest expression of that compromise. It's European-owned, headquartered in Luxembourg, and explicitly designed to keep the customer relationship, the data and the operational control inside European jurisdiction. Yet it runs on the US-built satellites of AST SpaceMobile. Sovereign in governance, dependent in technology, the same tension I opened with. Whether that counts as real sovereignty or a pragmatic halfway house is one of the more interesting arguments in this whole story, and it's exactly where I want to pick up in the next post.
For telcos this cuts two ways. The threat is disintermediation: a foreign provider with its own spectrum reaching your subscribers directly, leaving you a bypassed pipe. The opportunity is the mirror image: the sovereignty wave is actively trying to keep the customer, the data and the control inside the operator's hands, positioning telcos as the trusted, sovereign distribution channel rather than the disappeared middleman. Which of those futures an operator gets is, again, a matter of the choices it makes now.
Where this is going
That's the opening frame: an industry being remade, read through the one lens, telco impact, that I think matters most, and resting on a sovereignty question that deserves its own treatment.
In the posts to come I want to go deeper: into the sovereignty and regulatory battle (the spectrum fights, IRIS2, the US–China–EU contest); into a proper technical comparison of the constellations themselves (orbits, spectrum bands, terminals, capacity and the engineering trade-offs that decide who can do what); into the hard physical constraints that quietly entrench the first mover, namely launch capability and a low orbit that's filling up fast; and into the startup wave building a different kind of space infrastructure designed for operators rather than against them.
It's a genuinely interesting time to be paying attention.
This is part one of a series. Next: how connectivity became a sovereignty question, and what Europe is doing about it.