Satellite Operators

Telenor Satellite was never more than a side hustle for Norway’s telecom incumbent, a way to beam TV across Scandinavia and keep offshore oil rigs connected. It ran a couple…

Hispasat was always a small, polite GEO operator hovering over the Atlantic with just enough bandwidth to keep Iberia, North Africa, and Latin America connected. It lived mostly on broadcast…

Intelsat used to be the global satcom landlord, the one outfit every broadcaster, airline, and government had to pay rent to if they wanted to move bits through space. Born…

Eutelsat-OneWeb is the industry’s favorite Frankenstein experiment: graft a struggling GEO TV operator to a half-built LEO constellation and hope the two dying business models cancel each other’s weaknesses. Spoiler:…

Iridium is basically the stubborn weed of satcom: everyone assumed it would die in the late 90s, but instead it sprouted out of bankruptcy, shrugged off decades of ridicule, and…

Inmarsat is the dignified grandparent of the satcom industry, the one with war stories, expensive suits, and a British accent. Founded in 1979 to provide safety comms for ships at…

Viasat, founded back in 1986 in a bedroom-by-the-sea in Carlsbad, California, somehow managed to go from selling signal-noise widgets to the U.S. Army to becoming a mega satellite broadband player.…

SES is what happens when the satellite industry wears a suit, combs its hair, and tries to convince everyone it’s not worried about Starlink. Headquartered in Luxembourg (which is apparently…