Once considered an isolated, highly specialist field serving niche markets and remote communities, satellite connectivity has evolved into a critical component of digital infrastructure strategy. In an era marked by geopolitical instability, cable cuts, climate-related disruption and exponential demand for data, the convergence of satellite and terrestrial networks is not merely desirable; it is inevitable.

Moderated by Joe Apa, VP sales EMEA at Rivada Space Networks, the panel convened leaders from Telesat, SES, NEO Space, Avanti Communications and Marlink, each representing a different strategic angle in the evolving satellite-telco relationship. The core message resonated strongly: hybrid connectivity is moving from the sidelines to the very centre of strategic planning for operators, enterprises and governments.

From selling megahertz to selling outcomes

SES’s Peter Hall opened with a reflection on the fundamental shift in operating model across the sector: “If we rewind 10 years ago, we from the satellite operator industry would have been sitting here saying, how many megahertz do you want? And that conversation has totally changed… we have to be relevant to the telcos’ needs, and that means delivering a product which can be easily integrated, and often means offering a managed solution end to end.”

Satellite has moved firmly into the managed-service era. Capacity and coverage alone are no longer the value proposition. Instead, satellite operators are aligning with telco operational models — with automated orchestration, SLAs, integration toolkits and security frameworks.

Hall pointed to real-world events that pushed satellite back into mainstream telecoms discourse: “When I joined the operator world 15 years ago, we did very little business in Western Europe… and now we’re seeing governments and telcos looking again at satellite because of resiliency events, cable disruptions, natural disasters, geopolitical tensions.”

Satellite is no longer the connectivity of last resort; it is a strategic hedge against risk, and increasingly a performance enhancer for certain workloads.

LEO’s arrival and the need for market diversity
Telesat’s Glenn Katz addressed perhaps the most obvious question in hybrid-network discussions: the Starlink effect.“There is another satellite company… who’s proven the fact that LEO satellite technology is real… but the reality is this industry needs more than one player.”

Katz emphasised that LEO adoption is not a one-provider game. Diversity in architecture, interoperability, and multi-orbit strategy are becoming defining principles of the space-to-ground market.

He highlighted Telesat’s enterprise-centric design: “If you asked me to summarise what Lightspeed is in one sentence, it is a layer-two carrier Ethernet network in space… built to MeF 3.0 standards.”

The message was clear: success in serving telcos requires looking, operating and integrating like telcos, not expecting operators to adapt to satellite.

“Don’t bring a satellite engineer to the meeting,” he said jokingly.

Instead, Telesat sells familiar capabilities: carrier-grade service automation, lifecycle orchestration, SLA enforcement and secure traffic delivery. The focus is less on orbit types and more on business fit and operational alignment.

Latency: Important, but not everything

The conversation naturally turned to latency. Is ultra-low-latency satellite connectivity a game-changer for all markets? Martijn Blanken, CEO of NEO Space, argued for nuance: “Latency is important, but then again, not that important… most applications are somewhat latency tolerant. Gaming and video are the ones that mostly come to mind.”

According to Blanken, while ultra-low-latency services have relevance in financial trading and mission-critical enterprise workloads, the real commercial case is built on hybrid diversity and resilience rather than marginal latency gains for consumer streaming or browsing.
Even where latency matters, the ecosystem will remain mixed:

“If you want to provide true global coverage, you’ll have to work with a mesh of multiple technologies and multiple providers.”

Far from a winner-takes-all market, the future is a multi-orbit, multi-operator, multi-technology environment.

Multi-orbit service providers come into focus

If the operators are building the platforms, multi-orbit service providers are stitching them together into deployable solutions. Alban Gibassier, VP sales at Marlink, explained the role: “Customer does not really care about technology… they are just measuring the service they receive and how you support them.”

Marlink has quietly built one of the world’s most advanced satellite aggregation businesses, with the capacity to deploy across GEO, MEO and LEO and provide field support at scale.

Gibassier highlighted a compelling mobile backhaul use case: “Mobile operators need to open new sites… delivering fibre can take time. With satellites, they can turn on a site in two days, two hours… then replace it later.”

He added a high-value national project in Iceland, where multi-orbit capacity provides real-time redundancy for submarine cable routes — a textbook example of hybrid resilience in action.

The human-level imperative: Connecting the unconnected

Kyle Whitehill, CEO of Avanti Communications, shifted the conversation from data centres and SLAs to human impact: “600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa continue not to be connected… they want it for economic reasons, health, education, security… what keeps people’s lives going.”

For Avanti, hybrid networks are not a high-availability talking point; they are the only viable path to universal coverage. Whitehill described Avanti’s eight-year partnership supporting emergency services mobile connectivity in rural UK regions, including deployment during natural disasters, as an example of “hybrid working in the real world”.

He also spoke to the commercial complexity: “Telecom operators are incredibly difficult to deal with… we are just a very small part.”
In markets where survival and economic empowerment are the priority, satellite is not competing with fibre; it is filling a void that terrestrial infrastructure may take decades to reach.

Sovereignty and space: The new strategic frontier

As government and defence interests grow, satellite infrastructure is increasingly viewed through a national-strategy lens. Blanken noted: “We will see very few, if any, new satellite constellations launched without the backing of a nation state.”

Hall reinforced the sovereignty angle: “A sovereign gateway in a country is becoming a real point of interest… where the traffic landing is key.”
Satellite is becoming geopolitical, and multi-orbit infrastructure will increasingly be built around sovereignty, data jurisdiction and national resilience mandates.

Launch dynamics: Cost pressure, not bottlenecks

Discussing launch capacity, the panel countered common fears. Blanken argued: “It’s not a supply problem… but a bottleneck from the monetary side, because one company has such an enormous cost advantage.”

SES’s Hall added that competition has driven acceleration: “Technology has accelerated significantly… launch cost is being driven down, and that is lowering the cost per megabit.”

Rather than restricting deployment, launch market dynamics are pushing innovation and deepening the capital divide between next-generation platforms and legacy architectures.

Three to five years: What’s next?

Asked to look ahead, Katz stressed the central role of multi-orbit: “Particularly for reliability… before, we just didn’t have multi-orbits. Now we do.”
Gibassier echoed the sentiment: “Telcos were forced to use satellite in the past… now they are choosing it.”

Looking ahead, the panel agreed that the coming years will see a major expansion of hybrid edge and cloud architectures, with satellite acting as a seamless component in distributed compute and data environments.

Sovereign satellite and gateway strategies will accelerate, as nations seek to secure control over both space assets and data pathways. At the same time, AI-enabled routing across orbit types will become increasingly important in ensuring optimal performance, security and resilience.

Satellite connectivity is also expected to integrate more deeply into 5G networks and, in time, play a foundational role within 6G standards, enabling seamless mobility and service continuity across terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks.

Ubiquitous satellite-to-device capability will broaden access further, extending coverage without the need for specialised equipment. And crucially, satellite will no longer be seen purely as a back-up mechanism, but as a primary path for specific enterprise workloads where resiliency, security or reach demand it.

The message was unanimous: hybrid is not a trend; it is the new operating model for global connectivity.

Conclusion: Satellite steps into the network core
The satellite sector has crossed a structural threshold. No longer positioned as backup for remote sites or emergencies, it now sits at the heart of global connectivity planning. Multi-orbit networks, cloud-compatible services, automated orchestration and sovereign-grade architectures are redefining satellite’s place in digital infrastructure.

For telcos, satellite is transforming from bolt-on to built-in. The most relevant question is no longer whether to integrate satellite, but how quickly they can do it, and how deeply they can weave it into a hybrid connectivity, cloud and mobility strategy.

The hybrid future has arrived, and satellite is right at the centre of it.