March 25, 2025
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.
From Selling Bandwidth to a Managed Service Provider
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Read the full article: https://www.kratosspace.com/constellations/articles/multi-orbit-vs-starlink-is-disruption-coming-for-the-disruptor
