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 where you base a multinational comms empire if you like tax efficiency and medieval architecture) SES has been in the game since before most of today’s LEO hype merchants were born. And it shows. This is the kind of company that still talks about video distribution like it’s 2005 and Netflix didn’t happen.

Their legacy business is GEO. Big, stationary satellites parked over the equator, pumping out TV to Europe and beyond. Reliable, wide coverage, and perfect for broadcasters who don’t want to deal with cable networks or terrestrial anything. The kind of service that says, “You’ll take your 600ms latency and you’ll like it.” And to be fair, for a long time, that was fine. TV viewers aren’t gaming. Governments don’t care about Twitch lag. GEO made money, and SES made a lot of it.

But then came O3b.

Their “medium Earth orbit” experiment. MEO isn’t glamorous, doesn’t get venture-backed love letters in TechCrunch, and doesn’t lend itself to dramatic space imagery, but it works. The original pitch was noble: connect the “Other 3 Billion.” Which is great, until those 3 billion turn out to be incredibly expensive to serve and not great at paying for high-throughput satellite. Still, the tech was solid, and it gave SES a latency angle that GEO couldn’t.

Fast forward, and we get O3b mPOWER. This is SES putting on a leather jacket and pretending it’s a startup again. Software-defined beams, flexible bandwidth allocation, real-time traffic steering, all the buzzwords, now in MEO. It’s fast, scalable, and very much tailored for enterprise and government clients who don’t want to bet their networks on Elon’s mood swings. It’s not sexy, but it’s reliable. Like the Volvo of satellite constellations.

Now let’s talk strategy. SES just swallowed Intelsat, which is sort of like two rival middle-aged titans deciding it’s time to split the last steak instead of fighting over it. Together, they become a communications leviathan with a boatload of orbital real estate and more C-band spectrum than any one company should probably be allowed to own. The FCC cleared the path, investors nodded, and suddenly SES had more capacity, more regulatory clout, and fewer reasons to worry about being left behind by LEO cowboys.

They’re also in the IRIS² consortium

the EU’s answer to Starlink, but slower, more bureaucratic, and absolutely brimming with continental self-importance. The idea is to build a secure European constellation that doesn’t route data through California or get turned off by tweet. SES is playing nice, building pieces of the system, smiling through the committee meetings, and quietly making sure they stay indispensable to European comms infrastructure while everyone else argues over who gets what piece of the funding pie.

And yet, despite all of this, SES still has to answer awkward questions. Is MEO enough to compete with Starlink’s bandwidth dump truck? Will governments really care about orbit altitude when someone offers them global LEO service for a fraction of the cost? Can GEO video sustain them another decade, or is that segment just coasting on inertia? They’ve avoided the hype train, but that also means they don’t get to wear the “new space” badge. They’re not flashy, they’re not cheap, but they are functional, and sometimes that’s exactly what clients want.

While everyone else is screaming about thousands of satellites and rewriting the rules of orbital mechanics, SES is just sitting there, sipping a coffee, running multi-orbit demos, and signing defense contracts. They won’t win a popularity contest, but they might just outlast the ones who do.