Taking connectivity out of this world (and bringing it back again)

At Temono we’ve been working with clients in the Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) sector for the last couple of years, developing technology and launching services that use satellites to deliver 5G connectivity. We’ve seen the market evolve from early promise to greater maturity.

For a while, NTN was a story based on possibilities. Could you connect an ordinary phone to a satellite? Would 5G work from orbit? Will satellite and terrestrial networks ever behave like two parts of the same thing? Increasingly, the answer is yes. But the conversation has moved on quickly from can we do this? to how do we make it useful, scalable and commercially viable?

In a busy space, here are five things that have caught our attention recently.

1. Europe is (finally) getting serious about sovereign connectivity

If you’ve been paying attention to what the European Space Agency has been saying this summer, you can’t have missed talk about IRIS².

It isn't simply Europe's answer to Starlink, tempting though that shorthand might be. It's being designed around secure government communications, defence, emergency services, critical infrastructure and commercial connectivity, spanning Low- and Mid-Earth Orbit satellites, and this summer has seen it move from European ambition towards actual infrastructure, with revised plans bringing the main constellation to a projected 348 spacecraft.

This reflects a wider shift with satellite capacity, control over data, resilience and dependence on infrastructure which is owned elsewhere moving sharply up the agenda. “Sovereignty” can be a usefully vague word, but in the context of NTN it is becoming rather more concrete – who owns the infrastructure, who controls it, where does the data go and what happens if another network becomes unavailable?

These are now telecoms questions just as much as geopolitical ones.

2. Direct-to-device is growing up

Satellite-to-smartphone connectivity has always been the great crowd-pleasing use case of the NTN world. After all, This ordinary phone is talking to a satellite requires considerably less explanation than most telecoms demonstrations. But the novelty phase is wearing off, and the more interesting question now is what can you actually do with it? 

In the last 12 months, operators NTT Docomo in Japan and Kyivstar in Ukraine have launched Starlink-based services reportedly reaching 6.5 and 7.5 million cumulative users respectively within months of launch, supporting messaging and selected app data. Closer to home, Vodafone is targeting an early-2027 UK beta for its AST SpaceMobile-based service. These are quite a change from the idea of sending an emergency SOS message.

Satellite D2D isn't about putting every mobile mast out of business, though. Capacity, spectrum and indoor coverage all present limitations, so satellite is more likely to complement terrestrial coverage than replace it.

Which makes the next questions more interesting; cost, scale, service quality and how smoothly a phone moves between the mast down the road and the satellite above it.

3. The clever bit is making space and ground behave like one network

While this may be among the least spectacular parts of NTN, it is arguably the most important. The end goal isn't for users to wonder whether they're connected terrestrially or by satellite. Ideally, the network will just…work. Unfortunately, making something “just work” tends to involve quite a lot happening behind the scenes.

Airbus UpNext's SpaceRAN demonstrator, for example, has been testing beam handover, gateway handover and mobility between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks ahead of an in-orbit demonstration. While not scintillating on the face of it, perhaps, these are exactly the things that matter if satellite is going to become a genuine extension of the mobile network.

That's why “hybrid” is going to be an increasingly important word in NTN. The winning proposition isn't necessarily going to be satellite or terrestrial, but it's going to make the distinction matter less.

4. More of the mobile network is going into space

Put simply, a traditional communications satellite could be thought of as a very sophisticated mirror. A signal goes up, the satellite relays it and a signal comes back down. But this is changing, and rapidly.

In August this year, French company Univity demonstrated a bidirectional 5G NTN link using 26GHz mmWave spectrum with regenerative 5G processing onboard the satellite itself. Rather than simply bouncing the signal back to a terrestrial base station, the spacecraft hosted part of the 5G network functionality in orbit. And this isn't an isolated experiment, with 3GPP Release 19 supporting regenerative NTN architectures too.

Once you can process more of the network in space, you get more choices about where things happen, more flexible capacity, and different routing and less reliance on particular ground infrastructure. Add software-defined payloads and onboard computing, and the satellite starts to look much less like a relay and more like part of the network.

Which, when you think about it, is the point.

5. NTN is finding things to do besides rescuing your mobile signal

D2D gets plenty of attention because almost everybody with a phone has, at some point, stared at the words “No Service”. But some of the most interesting real-world NTN applications involve considerably less glamorous objects like shipping containers, cattle, pipelines, water meters, tractors, diggers, and weather stations.

Myriota launched its HyperPulse 5G NTN service for IoT last year and has since added terrestrial cellular connectivity for assets moving in and out of conventional network coverage. A tracker travelling through a city, down a motorway and then into the middle of nowhere doesn't particularly care which network is providing the connection. Its owner probably doesn't want to care either. Again, the convergence of the two is the interesting bit, and it’s enabling businesses all over the world to keep an eye on their assets.

And NTN isn’t stopping at communications. ESA's Celeste satellite recently transmitted standardised 5G positioning signals from low Earth orbit, demonstrating the potential to complement systems such as GPS and Galileo.

While there’s a long way between a demonstration and a mass-market service, it’s another reminder not to think too narrowly about NTN.

So, what comes back down to Earth?

NTN still has plenty of difficult problems to solve. Spectrum needs to be shared, satellites need launching at a scale that is still hard to conceive of, devices need to support the right standards, and networks need to hand users from one system to another without them noticing. And somebody, eventually, has to make some money from all of this.

That last point has a habit of being important. But even talking about these challenges shows how far NTN has come. Governments are procuring infrastructure around it, operators are putting services into market and more network functionality is heading into orbit.

Perhaps the “non-terrestrial” bit of NTN will eventually become the least interesting thing about it. Because the clever part isn't getting connectivity into space. It's what we can do with it when it comes back again.

If you’d like to learn more about our work in NTN and discuss how we can help support your company, particularly during the run-up to MNIS:NTN or MWC, where satellite-based networks are set to be the hot topic, do get in touch.