The deal

Under the expanded collaboration announced on 17 August, SES will give Elveo access to its global space and ground infrastructure and support the company’s go-to-market, engineering, operations and regulatory work. In return, SES’s mobile telecom, enterprise and government customers gain multi-orbit access to Elveo’s low-Earth orbit network alongside SES’s own GEO and MEO satellites.

SES chief executive Adel Al-Saleh called Elveo “an agile, forward-thinking innovator” and the right strategic partner for direct-to-device services.

SES was already an investor in both companies before their merger closed on 14 August, and remains one of Elveo’s leading shareholders. The new entity combines Lynk’s low-Earth orbit smallsat network with Omnispace’s licensed mobile satellite spectrum, and arrives with commercial agreements already in place across more than 50 mobile network operators in over 60 countries, including Spark in New Zealand, Globe Telecom in the Philippines and Vodafone Ghana.

The deepened Elveo tie-up follows a strong start to the year for SES more broadly, after the company posted an 80% revenue jump in the first quarter, driven largely by aviation connectivity growth rather than D2D, underlining how much of its current momentum still comes from outside the mobile satellite category it’s now investing to build.

Why the timing matters

Omnispace’s own D2D plans had stalled before the merger, after the company reported interference from SpaceX’s direct-to-device operations in the US. Folding that spectrum and technology into a combined entity, backed by a satellite operator with its own GEO and MEO fleet, gives Elveo a stronger footing to contest a market SpaceX has moved fastest in to date.

A three-way race, not a two-horse one

Direct-to-device connectivity beams coverage straight to unmodified smartphones without ground infrastructure, and has so far been framed largely as a contest between SpaceX’s Starlink, working with T-Mobile in the US, and AST SpaceMobile, partnered with AT&T and Verizon. Elveo’s relaunch, backed by SES’s multi-orbit infrastructure, positions a third serious contender against both, built specifically to challenge them on scale and technical breadth.

That existing rivalry is already playing out beyond the US: Ookla data published earlier this year showed the UK becoming the third-largest D2D market globally within weeks of Virgin Media O2’s Starlink-powered launch, with VodafoneThree preparing a competing AST SpaceMobile service for later in the year, a sign of how quickly the two incumbents are exporting their rivalry into new markets, and the scale Elveo will need to match if it’s to compete.

The distinguishing pitch is multi-orbit integration. Where SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile are building single-constellation LEO networks, Elveo combines its own LEO satellites with SES’s established GEO and MEO fleets, an architecture the companies describe as the first fully integrated, cost-effective multi-orbit D2D solution. Whether that combination proves commercially or technically superior to a pure-LEO approach is still unproven, but it gives Elveo a different value proposition to sell into rather than competing purely on constellation size.

Elveo also arrives with distribution already built out, a legacy of Lynk’s existing MNO relationships, rather than needing to build partnerships from scratch. That gives it a faster path to revenue than a new entrant would have, even as it works to scale its satellite fleet and prove the technology at volume.

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