Geopolitics forcing LEO-satellite operators to revise their strategies

Barriers for entering countries of the Global South

The imminent market entry of several 3GPP-standardised LEO satellite constellations has sparked a wave of excitement around the world. Especially in developing countries where these systems can serve to connect “the other 3 billion” un-connected.

However, the last few years have shown mounting geo-political tensions. In particular between Western countries with parliamentary democracies, and countries like Russia and China with more authoritarian regimes. As such, there is an increasing competition for geo-political and geo-economic world dominance.

Considering the growing dual, civilian-military use of LEO-satellites, China´s strong financial and political position in, and the energy dependency of many developing countries from Russia, this can have a very negative effect on the possibilities for LEO-sat operators from the Western world to gain regulatory market access for their services in these countries.

Especially because China is currently developing its own LEO-sat systems as an alternative for the initiatives from the US, Europe, and Japan, it is very likely that China and Russia will leverage their strong relationships with the governments in developing countries to favour the market entry of the Chinees system and impede the market entry of LEO-sat services from other countries in the Global South.

Need for changing the focus and revising strategies

Because this market represents a large part of the anticipated future revenues of most LEO-sat operators the above-mentioned geopolitical dynamics will have a huge impact on their business cases and force these companies to revise their strategies in order to obtain a larger part of their revenues from Western countries.

However, to be able to do this, these companies also have to revise their services strategy focussing more on the specific opportunities for LEO-sat services in developed countries. This includes offering their services as seamless extension of fixed and cellular services and addressing the needs of both residential and corporate clients to obtain sufficient revenues and economies of scale.

Lack of standardisation to meet corporate needs in the Western world

Therefore, it is a huge shortcoming that the latest 3GPP release 17 only facilitates interworking between 5G NTNs and TNs leaving full NTN/TN multi-connectivity to be covered by release 18 which is only scheduled for March ´24. This is far from ideal, likely resulting in LEO-sat operators - who will launch their services long before that date - to develop their own proprietary standards for this. Moreover, each LEO-sat operator covers only a small part of the whole 5G spectrum with its services, therefore only supporting a limited number of 5G use cases. As a result, each distributor wanting to offer a complete portfolio of 5G LEO-sat services is forced to connect to all the different services platforms of the different LEO-sat operators.

The Planet Earth Connect NaaS-platform

To solve this problem Planet Earth Connect is working on the development of a LEO-sat agnostic Network as a Service (NaaS) platform. This will provide this much needed multi-connectivity for all the relevant LEO-sat systems and proprietary standards. As such this platform will enable these LEO-sat operators and their distributors to effectively target and address the alternative opportunities in the Western countries as soon as their services are launched.

For more information

Has this sparked your interest, and do you want to know more about this initiative? Can´t you wait to join us on this exciting journey into uncharted territories? Then hesitate no longer and contact us through the following email address or telephone number.

e.ottolini@planetearthconnect.com

+44 741 747 6709