Despite the growing spotlight on low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, space-based communications will continue to showcase multi-orbit satellite connections.
So said Rhys Morgan, regional vice-president of the EMEA region for Intelsat, speaking to ITWeb on the side-lines of 2025 MWC Barcelona (formerly Mobile World Congress) earlier this month.
The discussion highlighted the evolving role of satellites in telecoms, emphasising their mainstream integration into networks, economic models for connecting rural areas and the potential of direct-to-device solutions, as well as SA’s plans for its own communications satellite project.
The world is witnessing an unprecedented surge in satellite launches, with 10 times more satellites now active compared to a decade ago, mostly in low Earth orbit, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Data showcased by the ITU’s Space Connect reveals the number of active satellites in 2014 was around 1 000, and that number was close to 10 000 last year.
Statistics show more than $60 billion was invested in the space business in the past 10 years, with nearly $50 billion in the last five years alone.
According to Morgan, there’s a huge amount of spacecraft now in LEO, with fewer medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary (GEO) satellites. However, he believes there is room for all three orbits and they will do different things.
“We’ll continue with GEOs, MEOs and LEOs because everybody's consuming more data. Today, we use the LEOs for latency-sensitive traffic. GEOs are for bigger files – video files and the like, which is about 80% of a network’s traffic.
“I think there’ll always be room for all three. If you just look at data consumption, it’s up year-on-year. All these different orbits will have a place, and they’ll be probably serving different applications as well for different customer types.”
Satellite technology has often been considered as the solution to provide ubiquitous internet access to the remote, hard to reach locations of the African continent.
While it’s been viewed as a complex and costly means of connectivity, with deployment concentrated more in rural areas, it is now “more dynamic” than ever, Morgan stated.
“There’s been a real change in terms of satellite mix within overall network portfolios. Satellites are becoming more mainstream within big telecommunications providers’ networks. It’s being viewed more as a tool to complement, rather than something that was the sort of last resort as it used to be.
“The big mobile operators, for example, are very much looking to replicate their consumer experience across all sorts of delivery modes. They see satellite as very valuable. Then there are new entrants into the marketplace that are bringing new approaches and making people consider satellite in more areas as a useful connectivity solution than perhaps previously.”
The Intelsat executive explained that his company is having conversations with customers in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, to help deliver LTE much more rapidly across the continent.
“We’ve got managed platforms now in SA. We’ve had one in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] for a long time, and we’re just about to commission the platform in Nigeria. These platforms give us the ability to offer a fully-managed solution to the MNOs [mobile network operators] that enable them to scale their networks rapidly.
“Five years ago, they might have used those platforms purely for rural connectivity. Now, they’re using it to rapidly deliver more connectivity into existing sites. They’re seeing it as a really effective additional sort of carrier technology within the portfolio. It’s not just microwave and fibre, it’s microwave, fibre and satellite, which is which is encouraging for us.”
While it cannot be discounted that satellite’s amplified shift to the mainstream is the result of the buzz around LEOs, Morgan added that direct-to-device (satellite communication) offers are also becoming a big thing.
Companies such as SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper Project, Shanghai municipal government-backed Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology and OneWeb have launched LEO satellite constellations.
All this activity, he said, is getting people thinking: “Okay, how do I use satellite? This could be valuable for us.”
He noted: “We’re seeing satellite brought more into the mainstream. If a strategy team or an innovation team at a telco is sat there thinking – how do we connect these people, how can we do something different? Satellite will be part of that conversation, whereas, maybe five or more years ago, it wasn’t really part of that conversation.”
Elevated role
While Intelsat doesn’t currently offer a direct-to-device proposition, Morgan revealed it has a LEO partnership with OneWeb, with plans to roll it out significantly across Sub-Saharan Africa this year.
“If we look in the African context, there are two companies that are really trying to push it. One is AST [SpaceMobile] that has a deal with Vodacom/Vodafone, and then another is a company called Link. We’re interested in the evolution, but we’re not a part of that development at the moment. [The developments] just bring satellite more front and centre, into the limelight. For us, it’s a good development because it means there is more interest around satellite.
“If I look at the LEOs, what we’re doing with the three platforms – in Nigeria, DRC, South Africa – the foundation there is our managed office. We have infrastructure in country, people in country, and we deliver a service via our GEO stationary satellites to connect towers. On top of that, we’ll overlay and fully integrate OneWeb services so that a tower will have a multi-orbit connection. The tower will have a GEO and LEO connection that will be managed within our platform.”
The service management portal shows every single site, in terms of traffic, data consumption and how many users have been on the site, he stated.
“For a mobile operator, they can say that a site in Tembisa, for example, is driving a lot of revenue; it needs more bandwidth. Or that a site in Cape Point is not driving much revenue, so they can decrease the bandwidth there, and then move that bandwidth to another site that’s making more money. It allows the operators to be dynamic in terms of the way they're looking at the sites.
“We did see the promise of LEO a long time ago. Equally, we also saw the promise in MEO. Different orbits have always been on our radar.”
To view a live visualisation of LEO satellites, click here.
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