Key Takeaways from SATELLITE 2026: NTN, Defense, and Sovereignty

ABI Research recently attended the SATELLITE 2026 conference in Washington, DC, hailed as the central meeting venue for the global space industry. At the show, considerable activity and dialogue revolved around sovereignty, the Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) standard, and the restored role of government in space, not only as a customer, but also as a venture capitalist to unlock commercial space ecosystems. The United States’ wartime footing has created a funding funnel that heavily incentivizes procurement frameworks, data sharing standards, and supply chain preferences toward U.S.-aligned commercial partners and contracts. Vendors now interweave cybersecurity, quantum resilience, Artificial Intelligence (AI), domain interoperability, and government design as priorities to ensure security and sovereignty, rather than “nice-to-have” features, from the chipset, ground network, and satellites themselves.

Another consistent narrative was around sovereignty: enabling dedicated space assets, data paths, and service continuity under geopolitical pressures. The real-time effects of overdependence on a single operator and the network are becoming clear. This implies operational and legal control, not necessarily domestically built infrastructure or industrial independence. In this way, Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and multi-orbit operators like Société Européenne des Satellites (SES), Astranis, Telesat, and Eutelsat OneWeb are distinctive and commercially viable in a market now largely dominated by SpaceX, where they can sell a new tier of sovereignty as a product even when manufacturing is done elsewhere. Geopolitical shakeups and capital conflicts are pushing operators to iterate faster in this domain.

Finally, Direct-to-Cellular (D2C)/Direct-to-Device (D2D) and NTN have become priorities for the industry. With release 19 frozen, the NTN standard now encompasses the L, S, Ka, and Ku bands alongside a new satellite architecture: regenerative payloads (gNodeBs onboard the satellites). For many satellite operators, the transition to support the NTN standard is not in the satellites themselves but in the ground network. Operators like SES announced that their network could be NTN-ready within 12 to 18 months (mid-late 2027) and are looking to verticals like maritime and aviation to bring forward a unique multi-orbit NTN solution. Indeed, many ground segment vendors, including Kratos Defense, ST Engineering iDirect, and Gilat are actively integrating their ground platforms with 3GPP NTN standards; however, commercially available Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) terminals capable of supporting the standard have yet to reach the market.

1. The Sovereignty Premium: The irony of the sovereignty push is that it cuts both ways for the incumbent market. On one hand, single GEO satellites can be dedicated to single customers with specific requirements, enabling dedicated capacity, security, and control with no “shared” infrastructure. In theory, GEO operators could provide GEO-slicing (a managed private network) for clients, effectively carving out a slice of their GEO network as a logically isolated, customer-controlled environment with local infrastructure, encryption, dedicated spectrum, and local subsidiaries, functionally delivering sovereignty without outright customer ownership. On the other hand, the push toward dedicated national space assets will threaten the long-standing shared-capacity wholesale model that GEO operators have long relied on. Leasing capacity may no longer be viewed as enough, and another layer of control is desired. Furthermore, a managed service agreement, as mentioned before with GEO-slicing, may not be perceived as actual control, where owning the satellite outright eliminates dependency. Incumbents are now trying to occupy a middle-tier in the sovereignty market, more sovereign than leasing capacity on a shared satellite, but less sovereign than owning a dedicated asset. This will introduce cost constraints on incumbent business models, as they will now have to grapple with a market that is no longer shopping for a leased or shared asset, breaking the revenue streams of selling unused transponders on satellites.
2. Defense Demand Pulling Commercial Roadmaps: Defense requirements are now actively shaping commercial constellation design decisions and roadmaps. Operators like Telesat (Lightspeed), SES, and Eutelsat OneWeb are recognizing that defense and government capital is underwriting the economics for constellations, which pure commercial economics may not justify. Dual-use specs from the ground and space segments will be hardcoded into product roadmaps moving forward. This means less focus on whether there is a commercial sense behind a constellation and more on the anchor client, being government. This also means that technologies that inherently hold more strategic value for defense industry requirements, post-quantum security, AI-enhancement, radiation tolerance, and optical communications are what will help raise capital and enforce competitive positioning. This also systematically excludes smaller operators and accelerates industry consolidation, as larger operators can absorb the Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Research & Development (R&D) requirements of defense-grade constellation development, bifurcating the market between a handful of strategic infrastructure operators and a commoditizing tier competing purely on bandwidth economics with SpaceX.
3. Mobile Network Operator (MNO) Partnerships Becoming the New Operator Growth Vector: NTN and D2D are one of the most consequential growth vectors in satellite communications today. With the entire NTN ground integration push relying on satellite-MNO agreements, the industry is pushing further into partnership-first go-to-market strategies. The structural shift lies in how NTN integration embeds satellite connectivity directly into the MNO’s existing subscriber, roaming, and Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) architecture, which goes beyond legacy wholesale backhaul models. In the VSAT NTN context, this new level of integration will expand the commercial opportunities for MNOs and satellite operators, as these systems unlock new backhaul and fixed wireless access opportunities across verticals that operate in frequent coverage gap environments such as drones, aviation safety, maritime, transport and logistics, and more. However, MNOs are increasingly positioned as service aggregators and source capacity from multiple satellite operators, which contests revenue share dynamics and applies pressure on satellite operators lacking exclusive spectrum advantages.

Attending SATELLITE in DC stressed that the trajectory of the space industry has shifted. The 2026-2028 window is now an architecture-setting period, and the partnerships, platform decisions, and spectrum agreements made in the next 24 months will determine competitive positioning for the next decade.

• For Component and Network Vendors: The era of proprietary L-band and VSAT waveforms is closing and giving rise to open standards. Vendors that arrive at the certification milestone first own the reference architecture that operators build around. In this way, commercially available NTN VSATs remain a gap in the industry, where vendors shipping certified cost-competitive terminals can capture the Rel-19 deployment cycle. Therefore, accelerating chipset and modem partnerships for NTN User Equipment (UE) certification will be critical in helping shape which satellite operators’ networks are UE-compatible first. Additionally, cloud-native Radio Access Network (RAN) vendors Mavenir and Radisys are moving aggressively on NTN with Accelercomm, targeting Internet of Things (IoT) NTN with shorter deployment timelines. Through software integration, they could eventually establish their solutions as reference architectures if Ericsson and Nokia fail to move quickly enough on this transition.
• For Satellite Operators: The growing demand in sovereign networks requires an explicit commercial strategy apart from shared-capacity markets. Using the same product and pricing to serve both markets will undermine both, necessitating a clear separation in go-to-market strategies. Securing MNO anchor contracts for NTN and D2C will also be critical in the coming months as new satellites and networks come online. The window to negotiate more favorable revenue share terms degrades as competition grows and revenue becomes dependent on MNO distribution.
• For Telcos: Telcos should evolve their relationship with space networks from being a capacity buyer to an architecture partner. Telcos currently hold temporary leverage in negotiating power over satellite NTN providers, with only a few MNOs structurally supporting NTN, but this will shift as satellite operators and their MNO partnership breadth scale across markets. In the same way, telcos should develop a multi-vendor strategy for NTN. SpaceX’s experience in Ukraine illustrates the well-understood risk of overdependence on a single operator. Therefore, MNOs with national security exposure or sovereign customer bases should actively cultivate at least two satellite provider relationships across different orbit types, ensuring no single provider can unilaterally affect service continuity.