Global – October 28, 2026 -- ST Engineering iDirect SVP Brian Jakins argues that sovereignty, multi-orbit resilience and open ecosystems, not satellite count, will decide who leads satellite communications in the next decade.
More than 120 mobile operators now partner with satellite players, yet customers still struggle to get capacity
Jakins says customers in Asia, LATAM and the Middle East keep asking why capacity is so hard to obtain when GEO, MEO and LEO supply is greater than ever. He cites mega-constellation launches, Europe's IRIS2 moving into production and Amazon Leo scaling up. By his account, customers want less complexity, not more connectivity.
Governments now treat sovereignty as a cabinet-level procurement issue
Jakins says sovereignty has moved from the defence ministry to the cabinet table, reshaping procurement from Brussels to Riyadh to Jakarta. At SatShow this year, Viasat's Mark Dankberg noted that a company in space can deliver connectivity into a country “whether you want it or not.”
Jakins warns that poorly executed sovereignty becomes isolation. He backs sovereign operations, data governance and security built on open, multi-vendor foundations.
Multi-orbit orchestration and direct-to-device reshape the addressable market
Jakins says the debate over which orbit wins is over. LEO offers low latency, GEO efficient wide-area reach and MEO a middle path. The value lies in matching each application to the right network in real time.
He calls direct-to-device and 5G non-terrestrial networks the biggest change to the addressable market in a generation. Satellite must become standards-based, cloud-native, integrated with the mobile core and able to roam across networks and orbits. He concedes the revenue will take time to prove.
Vertically integrated players and open ecosystems compete for the next cycle
Jakins describes an industry splitting between vertically integrated players that own everything from rocket to terminal and open ecosystems built on interoperable networks and standards-based interfaces. He expects the open model to win with governments that cannot depend on a single provider and with operators modernising at their own pace.
Delivering it requires more partnering, faster standardisation and a pace closer to software than the industry's five-to-seven-year cycles, he says. On AI and automation, he says operators in government and critical infrastructure must keep oversight and set the policies that guide automated decisions.