The satellite connectivity industry is going through a change where its metaphorical voice has dropped an octave and it’s breaking out in spots.
A report published last month by Novaspace declared that the global satellite market has entered what it calls a “Post-Capacity Era”. Raw bandwidth has stopped being a competitive differentiator, and operators are being forced to find value elsewhere. Starlink’s sub-$0.30 per gigabyte pricing has reset benchmarks that once seemed unassailable, and with Amazon’s LEO constellation entering service in 2026, the pressure is unlikely to ease. The race for coverage, standardisation, and integration with 5G terrestrial networks is well under way. Most of the industry is moving in the same direction.
Two markets, one technology
That commoditisation story only describes one part of the market, though. Consumer and general enterprise broadband – the Starlink heartland – is following the classic price-volume curve of any infrastructure technology that achieves maturity and scale. The industry’s response has reflected that: demonstrations of 5G NTN connectivity over GEO satellite, direct-to-device services designed for unmodified smartphones, a raft of announcements at MWC Barcelona targeting coverage extension for mobile network operators. This echoes the process that we’ve seen play out before, for example in mobile data.
The sovereign government and critical enterprise segment is a structurally different market with different purchasing logic. Its emergence is, in significant part, a consequence of the maturity of the rest of the satellite sector.
Consider what happened in early February. Russian forces had built a meaningful battlefield dependency on Starlink, obtaining terminals through grey-market supply chains despite never being an official customer. When Ukraine presented SpaceX with evidence that Russian units had been attaching Starlink antennas to long-range attack drones, the company worked with Kyiv to implement a whitelist system. Unauthorised Russian terminals were cut off within days, with consequences on the frontline that were, by multiple accounts, severe.
The broader takeaway is not specific to Russia or to wartime. A commercial operator, under pressure from a paying customer and its home government, revoked connectivity that an adversary had come to depend on, and did so at short notice and at scale. It reflects the fact that, regardless of what globalists might want, commercial operations are inextricable from their political environments and in recent years this fact has been presented to us time and again.
For any government or enterprise with genuine security requirements, that is a significant scenario to hedge against – but, again, only because of the significance and maturity of the satellite industry today. If SpaceX had shut off the supply of raisins to Russia I doubt many would have cared.
A company that arrived by a different route
Open Cosmos does not appear alongside SpaceX and Amazon in the coverage layer conversation, and that positioning is deliberate. The company, headquartered near Oxford with manufacturing across Spain, Portugal and Greece, built its business on Earth observation, designing, building and operating satellites for governments and institutions that wanted sovereign imagery capability.
Their connectivity proposition, branded ConnectedCosmos and announced at MWC, came out of a different kind of market intelligence than most LEO operators bring to the table.
“For the past few months, we have basically understood there was a significant need for sovereign, resilient communications emerging in Europe,” said Tiago Rebelo, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer.
“But given the scope of the geopolitical and the multipolar world that we are living in, there is a need for global secure point-to-point communications. Communications that don’t go through servers that countries don’t control. Communications that are not depending on a single individual to decide if they’re powered on or powered off.”
Space Cables (Spables?)
ConnectedCosmos rests on an architectural premise that sets it apart from virtually everything else in LEO connectivity. It is gateway-less. User terminals connect directly to the satellite layer. The satellites link via optical inter-satellite links, routing data across the constellation in orbit rather than via terrestrial gateways. No ground infrastructure in the signal path means no single jurisdiction-specific chokepoint, and no structural opportunity for a third party to redirect traffic.
“What we provide, very simply put, it’s a cable,” Rebelo told TelcoForge.
“It’s a cable to connect two points in the most secure manner that you can imagine. We are not dictating your encryption. We are not dictating your routing. You can encrypt it, you can use whatever you believe is going to work, right? And then from the satellite perspective, it’s inter-satellite links, it’s optical.” On that last point, unlike radio-frequency signals, optical ISL traffic cannot be passively captured in transit.
The regulatory anchor for the constellation is a high-priority Ka-band filing held in Liechtenstein, awarded to Open Cosmos in January. Two prototype satellites launched via Rocket Lab on 22 January activated the filing – establishing “bring back into use” in ITU terminology, meaning the filings are live and Open Cosmos holds the right to deploy up to approximately 600 satellites under existing regulatory capacity. The first commercial batch is currently being manufactured, with a second planned for early next year.
Rebelo was candid that the constellation will scale to demand rather than to a committed number. SpaceNews noted in early March that the mid-2026 deployment deadlines lacked public detail on capitalisation. That is a fair observation. A demand-responsive model is also, for a B2B proposition where government and enterprise customers provide the anchor contracts, a commercially rational response to deployment risk.
The convergence that matters
The point-to-point connectivity offer is a very interesting original offering. The integration of that connectivity layer with Open Cosmos’s existing Earth observation capability is more so.
When a satellite images the ground, typically the satellite holds that data until it passes within range of a ground station, at which point it downloads. Depending on orbital geometry and ground station coverage, the delay between image capture and delivery to a user can run from a few minutes to several hours. For time-sensitive applications such as disaster response, border monitoring or infrastructure protection that latency is often the limiting factor in how useful the data actually is.
Open Cosmos has already been interconnecting its EO satellites with third-party constellations to address this. The ConnectedCosmos architecture takes it one step further. The Earth observation layer sits at approximately 500km; they are using optical ISLs to connect back to communications satellites 1,000km above the planet and send images back through those.
“The Earth observation satellites are capable of basically sending the imagery in real time through this network,” said Rebelo. “And then it comes down on the user terminal instantly.”
If the service delivers as described, the operational implication is genuinely different from anything else on offer in this segment – imagery and communications arriving as a unified near-real-time data stream rather than as two separate services.
“That fundamentally changes decision-making,” Rebelo said, “Whether it’s for disaster response, infrastructure monitoring or security operations. It’s the convergence of sensing and connectivity that sets this apart.”
The space environment is changing too
One thing the Open Cosmos story reflects that tends to get lost in the connectivity discussion is the evolving structure of the space segment itself. The company has been connecting its EO satellites to third-party constellations for data relay – a multi-operator, multi-orbit arrangement that would have been unusual even five years ago. Different satellites from different operators in different orbital regimes cooperating in near-real-time is a practical expression of an industry that is becoming, as Rebelo put it, more open.
“For many years, space enterprises were talking to space enterprises like they were pretending they understood what were the needs of the telcos, of the governments,” he said. “That’s changing. The way we see it, infrastructure is an enabler. It’s like a cell tower. Satellites will become a commodity in forty years, just like cell towers eventually did. And then you add services on top.”
Protective
Open Cosmos’s sovereign secure positioning overlaps meaningfully with the EU’s IRIS² programme – the 290-satellite multi-orbit constellation being built by the consortium of SES, Eutelsat and Hispasat. IRIS² is well-funded and architecturally ambitious, but is targeting operational service around 2029. The EU activated its interim GOVSATCOM pooling capability in January 2026, but this draws on existing member state satellite capacity and is constrained in bandwidth and reach. The gap between what European governments need now and what IRIS² will eventually provide is the market Open Cosmos is entering.
Whether it has the runway to fill that gap is a question the next eighteen months will go some way to answering. What the company illustrates, in the meantime, is what differentiation can look like once a satellite market has moved past capacity as its primary axis of competition: not more bandwidth, and not cheaper bandwidth, but a different architecture, different ownership structure, and a capability stack that the mainstream industry is not well-positioned to replicate in the near term.
