{"id":48414,"date":"2025-09-16T19:04:42","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T11:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/operators-ceos-see-huge-opportunities-in-government-market\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T19:04:42","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T11:04:42","slug":"operators-ceos-see-huge-opportunities-in-government-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/operators-ceos-see-huge-opportunities-in-government-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Operators CEOs See Huge Opportunities in Government Market"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

PARIS \u2014<\/em> Global satellite operators continue to see growing demand for satcom from global governments, top CEOs told the opening day of World Space Business Week attendees on Monday.<\/p>\n

Telesat<\/strong> CEO Dan Goldberg said he underestimated how large government demand would be for Lightspeed, Telesat\u2019s Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation in development. \u201cWe always expected it would be large when we pulled the trigger and started building Lightspeed, but I think we underestimated how big it would be,\u201d he said, adding that government demand is \u201chuge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn current conflicts, Starlink in particular has proven to be absolutely consequential and decisive, which has underscored for governments all around the world the importance of having that type of a capability,\u201d Goldberg said. \u201cU.S. allies have committed to spend a lot more money to meet their NATO commitments and that\u2019s true for the government of Canada, I think it\u2019s true for most governments. There\u2019s a big desire that those capabilities be sovereign.<\/p>\n

Closer to home, Goldberg sees a large opportunity with the Canadian government, and said other nations could also be in the mix for services based on Telesat\u2019s Lightspeed constellation. \u201cThere are lots of other countries that need this capability. Ideally, they would like to build it themselves. But for the foreseeable future, there will be governments around the world leveraging commercial LEO constellations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There could also be an opportunity for Telesat and the Canadian government to work with the European Union when Lightspeed enters service ahead of IRIS\u00b2 while it waits for IRIS2 to come online. \u201cI believe the government in Canada is very open to that. We\u2019d be hugely receptive to working with our European partners to make that capability available in a sovereign, secure way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Fallacher, CEO, Eutelsat <\/strong>added that the geopolitical situation is showing that warfare is changing. \u201cThere is more and more interest in our assets whether those are GEO or LEO. We are working with a lot of our partners, especially our OEMs and the supply chain to harden communications for more government usage,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mark Dankberg, CEO, Viasat<\/strong> added that looking at what is going in Ukraine, it shows the increasing importance of space capabilities, and showcasing the high amounts of bandwidth needed to run applications. Ukraine is showing many different facets to satellite usage.<\/p>\n

Dankberg added, \u201cThere are counter measures to LEO and GEO systems. The rate at which the countermeasures are evolving is fast. From a technology race perspective, there\u2019s opportunity to come up with more robust systems. The thing that is becoming an issue from a national security perspective now is that there are few boundaries between civil, military, and commercial targets anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, when talking about the pros and cons of GEO and LEO, Dankberg said one of the interesting learnings to come out of Ukraine is that there is very \u201clocalized activity\u201d meaning it a challenge for the industry to deliver in very localized parts of Ukraine where actual capacity is needed.<\/p>\n

One of the interesting comments on the panel was whether there would be new business cases for GEO satellites around video. Goldberg said on this, \u201cWhile there are GEO satellites in orbit, there will be leveraged with LEO. They can be a nice complement to those LEO networks. I think it will be hard to close business cases for GEO satellites. I think the use for multi-orbit will ultimately be a narrow use case, so potentially a government user with niche needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Viasat and Hughes, which both have a direct-to-consumer have also seen declines in consumer broadband subscriptions in recent years with competition from Starlink, but Dankberg thinks Viasat will still grow its consumer broadband subscribers.<\/p>\n

\u201cConsumer broadband is the highest volume, lowest yield. If you have a portfolio of services, this one will be on the lowest rung. It is in the portfolio. I think we can grow the number of customers in consumer broadband, despite of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hughes<\/strong> COO Paul Gaske said that consumer broadband is facing headwinds not just from LEO, but from broadband subsidy programs and pressure as wireless operators provide fixed wireless from their towers. Hughes is responding by migrating capacity over to higher growth areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a lot of demand for our aviation customers and some of our other business customers, and we fully expect to be moving that capacity actively over spaces that show more capability to grow,\u201d Gaske said. \u201cAdditionally, we\u2019ve invested heavily in Fusion technologies bringing together multiple satellite capabilities like LEO, GEO, and even terrestrial. Fusion technology we think is the future for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, it is clear the impact of Starlink and Amazon\u2019s Project Kuiper is being keenly felt in the market. Fallocher talked about how the connectivity business is being heavily disrupted. He spoke of the \u201celephants in the room\u201d \u2014 Starlink and Project Kuiper and how Eutelsat will continue to concentrate on the B2B part of the market, rather than the B2C side. \u201cOur two American competitors are completely disrupting the market. Starlink and Kuiper, we are the only European alternative to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as Starlink has shown, the growth for satellite services in connectivity is potentially massive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe TAM [total addressable market] on the global broadband connectivity side is vastly bigger than the addressable market for satellite-delivered multi-channel video services,\u201d Goldberg said. \u201cI hate to see the direct-to- home video market inexorably declining over time, but there is a massive market for enterprise broadband connectivity that meaningfully eclipses the market that I think is going away for good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PARIS \u2014 Global satellite operators continue to see growing demand for satcom from global governments, top CEOs told the opening day of World Space Business Week attendees on Monday. Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said he underestimated how large government demand would be for Lightspeed, Telesat\u2019s Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation in development. \u201cWe always expected it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48415,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48414"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}