Ground Station-as-a-Service Liftoff to Address Satellite Communications Demand

The Satellite Communications (SatCom) industry continues to build momentum. Starlink has now racked up over 7,700 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as of June 5, 2025. This is stimulating competition from a number of satellite service providers, such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper, as well as AST SpaceMobile and Lynk. Similarly, on the ground, a number of ground station operators have been repositioning themselves in the market. Recent developments include:

• Telesat has been evaluating partners for a US$1 billion ground station network buildout. This expansion is needed for its Lightspeed constellation, which is set to begin launches in 2026.
• Speedcast is considering selling off its ground station operation for a potential US$1 billion. Speedcast wishes to focus more on SatCom customer operations and de-leverage some of its capital-intensive assets.
• Eutelsat Group sold an 80% stake in its ground station business to EQT, a Swedish investment firm. Eutelsat remains a key anchor tenant and partner.
• Microsoft retired its Azure Orbital ground station service and sold the gateway antennas to Space Leasing International.

These ground station developments are highlighting a transition to more specialized strategies and operational modes that have taken place in the wired and wireless telecoms sector and Information Technology (IT) sectors over the past 15 years.

Notably, Eutelsat’s packaging up of its ground station gateways and selling them off to EQT is witnessing the rollout of the Ground Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) model. Eutelsat has been diversifying its business model. Historically, it has made its money in satellite TV services, which still represent approximately 50% of its revenue, but the sector’s outlook is shrinking. Eutelsat has expanded into fixed and mobile connectivity. Eutelsat’s acquisition of OneWeb, a LEO operator with over 600 satellites in orbit, presents opportunities in NTN and the wider enterprise connectivity sector. Eutelsat has been in the final stages of building out and operating 45 gateways spread across the world.

ABI Research has been tracking the trials, initial deployments, and full commercial operation of over 815 satellite operations in space. As of the end of 2024, there were an estimated 10,100 satellites in orbit and that figure could potentially grow to over 43,000 by 2032. While end users may be communicating directly with an overhead satellite, a significant amount of voice, messaging, and data will need to be relayed to another country and/or the Internet. Gateways serve that process. Only a handful of satellite service providers will have the funding to set up gateways at national or regional teleports. Securing landing rights and gateways in strategic markets can take significant investment and often involves a protracted regulatory approval process. With the rise of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), regional and global Earth Observation (EO) platforms, etc., the need for gateways and landing rights has grown exponentially.

As the number of satellites in orbit proliferate, the need to transmit traffic from ground to satellite, and vice versa, will inevitably grow. Some of the larger satellite service providers may be sitting pretty with an effective spread of gateways across the world/their region, but many of the more recent entrants will need to secure access to ground station gateways in several markets. The GSaaS operation acquired by EQT could benefit a number of satellite networks. By achieving greater gateway utilization, the EQT operation should be able to drive down the cost of its GSaaS operation.

ABI Research anticipates that due to direct ownership, as well as leasing and offering GSaaS of ground station gateways, the number of teleports hosting ground station gateways will grow past 930 by the end of 2025. The number of earth station antennas at these sites is expected to grow from over 46,000 by the end of 2025 to over 53,000 by the end of 2032 (source: ABI Research’s Global Satellite Teleport and Earth Station Tracker (MD-SATG-101)). The ground station market is complex and layered with regulatory compliance. National regulators are likely to keep a keen eye on the gateway sector—they would not want their satellite operations, and indeed the terrestrial enterprise customers that use gateways for inter-regional communications, to be controlled by a limited number of players.