Two direct-to-device services, one from GEO, one from LEO
In sum – what to know:
- Continuity over capacity – Orange found demand for always-on satellite messaging even in territories with near-complete terrestrial coverage, and resilience after this summer’s fires outranked the original business case.
- The stack, end to end – Skylo’s NB-NTN service runs through Orange’s core, billing and provisioning up to the Pixel handset, with the customer relationship explicitly staying Orange’s.
- Resilience at scale – Kyivstar’s Starlink layer reached more than 10% of its base within a month and 7.5 million unique users in nine months by staying an automatic add-on rather than a separate service.
For all the discussion of 6G architectures and WRC-27 agenda items, direct-to-device (D2D) is already a commercial service — sold as an option on a European mobile plan, and used by millions of people in a country whose terrestrial network is under physical attack. The two operator case studies at RCR Wireless News’ NTN Integration Forum sat at opposite ends of the deployment spectrum. One is a narrowband messaging service over a geostationary satellite, integrated end to end from the core network to the Android operating system and marketed as much for peace of mind as for emergencies. The other is a supplemental-coverage service over a LEO constellation that reached more than 10% of an operator’s base within weeks of launch, because the alternative was silence.
What unites them is the lesson both operators drew: what customers want is continuity — the certainty that a message will get through from a mountain, a flooded valley or a blacked-out city — and the operators that succeed are the ones that define that value precisely, keep the customer relationship where it belongs, and treat the satellite layer as an extension of their own network.
Bringing direct-to-device connectivity to commercial reality
Ronan Le Bras, head of technical strategy for wireless and IoT at Orange, traced the operator’s satellite messaging service to two customer requirements. The first was ubiquitous coverage. “We have a very good coverage in most of our countries in Europe,” he said, with coverage ranging from 95% to 98% or 99% in some territories, but “there’s always some places that are difficult to cover, like mountainous and forest,” and “there are always some customers to find a white zone.” The second was resilience, which “is becoming now a very key aspect in our networks” after severe weather, forest fires in Europe this summer, flooding, and hurricanes in Orange’s overseas territories. Orange also wanted to go beyond the emergency-only services already on the market: satellite messaging is not only for emergencies but also for sending a message where there is no mobile network or Wi-Fi, “just to say I’m okay, I’ve reached the top of the mountain I was climbing.”
Marko Keskinen, managing director for Europe at Skylo Technologies, set the market baseline in the present tense on purpose. “We like to talk about NTN services and direct-to-device connectivity in present tense, so not in future tense. Meaning that it’s business today, and it’s actually scaling fast.” Skylo has more than 20 million connected devices on its non-terrestrial network (NTN), coverage in more than 40 countries, and more than 100 certified devices and chipsets live, and its philosophy is that “every Skylo subscriber is effectively an operator subscriber. So we are extending the operator’s base. We are not building a parallel one.”
Standing the service up in France required end-to-end integration. The Skylo network, built on 3GPP’s IoT NTN standards, was interconnected with Orange’s core, and the integration extended up to the application on the device — Google Pixel 9 and later, in Orange France’s case — including the layer in the Android operating system. The interface is everyday messaging, but a logo shows the user is on the satellite layer, and because Skylo uses a geostationary satellite, the phone guides the user to point toward it. Keskinen described the same work as three things that had to converge: the standards in the device baseband, “currently, of course, NB-NTN, and then moving towards NR-NTN to complement it”; a mainstream device ecosystem not limited to niche models; and operational integration into the mobile network operator’s own stack, “including subscriber, billing, provisioning.” On the customer relationship, Le Bras was clear. “The customer is still an Orange customer,” he said; the service is an option on the subscription, and customers are told plainly when it can be used and what it can do. Skylo, for its part, runs “a software-defined network that is basically constellation agnostic, meaning GEO today, GEO and/or LEO, or maybe both going forward,” presenting the same MNO interface and device ecosystem on any orbit.
An audience question about whether the core network will ultimately treat non-terrestrial assets as cell sites or as a roaming partner drew a considered answer. Both models exist, Le Bras said, and “they have their benefit.” If the core treats the NTN layer as a network extension, Orange expects faster transitions from terrestrial to satellite. Core-to-core interconnection, “which is more like a roaming-based approach, is maybe simpler to implement at first.” But it is like moving to a different country: “you don’t have a seamless experience. You will have an interruption.” Which model fits depends on whether agreements are exclusive or multi-operator, on geography, and on regulation, since the service is tied to the type of spectrum and the rules attached to it. Sometimes, he said, the applicable regulation will dictate a certain type of architecture, with some elements located in particular countries.
Le Bras’s learnings from the first months were about demand and resilience. “Even in countries like France where the coverage is already good, there is desire for some customers to have this type of always-on connectivity.” People in mountainous regions have used the service to reach emergency services, and after the fires in Spain and France this summer, “this is a use case that will repeat itself over the next few years, and we should be ready.” “The resilience aspect came with probably even more importance than maybe originally what we thought it would be.” On the roadmap, non-real-time services — messaging, light apps, maps — can already be served by existing D2D solutions. Voice is different: “you need to have a continuity of service, and you need also to have a certain quality” sustained over several minutes, which may mean multiple satellites. “For light data, non-real-time application, I think there are already some solutions. We need to work for the real-time application.” Keskinen framed the evolution the same way — “the satellite behaves like another mode of the same network, rather than something that the user actually notices,” NB-NTN and NR-NTN are “complementary, not like sequential generations,” and services move from sensor traffic, SOS and native SMS toward data-heavy applications along three swim lanes: consumer smartphones and wearables, IoT and automotive. Asset tracking is already business. “Cattle tracking qualifies as asset tracking. That’s actually big, as you might expect, in the U.S. Midwest, where in some places there are probably more cows than people.”
How close is the industry to orchestrating an operator’s multiple satellite relationships as one system? “It would still take a few years before we reach this ubiquitous service,” Le Bras said. Spectrum, terrestrial-to-non-terrestrial mobility and the business model all have milestones ahead, because the value has to be shared among the different players, “and this is not going to happen in one step.” Orange operates in Europe and Africa, “completely two different contexts,” so a unified system can be a goal, but “it’s more maybe to have a more pragmatic approach” that solves the pain points where they exist. Keskinen’s strategic horizon is wider. The radio link “doesn’t have to stop at carrying just data”; over time, it can also tell you something about the environment around it. “So in a way, you could say that connectivity and awareness will converge on the same infrastructure.” And as more of what connects is “a system acting on somebody’s behalf,” such as swarms of AI agents, the network’s job expands from delivering bits to establishing trust. Assistants, agents and contextual services “don’t always require massive throughput, but they actually require persistence, and they fail when connectivity breaks because the intelligence actually loses context” — his case for why NTN, increasingly based on NR-NTN, matters more in 18 months than it does today. Le Bras measured the pace by what had already happened: Orange’s satellite messaging launched at the end of 2025 in France, and 18 months from now he expects a more mature ecosystem on both the device and network sides and, alongside today’s NB-NTN and LTE-based solutions, “the first solution based on 5G NTN, NR-NTN, arriving on the market.” The service is real, the demand is real, and the roadmap from messaging to voice runs through the harder part: holding a continuous, guaranteed-quality link over minutes rather than seconds, and across several satellites rather than one.
Kyivstar’s D2D journey: from NTN deployment to service continuity
Sean Kinney, principal analyst at RCR Wireless News, framed the session with a redefinition of the coverage hole. It “isn’t necessarily somewhere that a carrier has not built a network. It can be somewhere that had perfectly good service yesterday, but doesn’t today because of a blackout, damaged infrastructure, or some other disruption.” Illia Polshakov, chief new business stream officer at Kyivstar, explained how that reality shaped the Ukrainian operator’s approach, and why it began with a question rather than a technology: what problem are you trying to resolve? An operator can add resilience or develop a mass-market business, and for Kyivstar the answer was clear. “For us, it’s very important to be always online for our customers, B2C, B2B.”
Kyivstar has a solid terrestrial network and has invested heavily in energy resilience. “But still, you cannot be 100% available if something goes wrong. And in such situations, you can imagine many examples how you feel if you don’t have any connectivity. This is a silence.” Even a plain SMS over satellite shows customers they can always be online — a new layer of resilience on top of the terrestrial network, and in Polshakov’s view a new level for the telecom industry itself. Kyivstar built its partnership with Starlink quickly, became the first European operator with an official launch of the service, and is now progressing to light data. “But first of all, resilience, resilience, and new level of resilience.”
Asked where Starlink ends and Kyivstar begins, Polshakov answered in terms of customer experience rather than the stack. The constellation’s capacity is limited — “nothing like 100,000 satellites,” he said, shorthand for the gap between the constellation counts in industry headlines and the few hundred any one user can reach — and the operator should manage “this tiny capacity of network” as an add-on to the terrestrial network rather than positioning it as a separate service. It is an extra layer for when something goes wrong. The technology “perfectly works like a dome,” but the operator has to solve concrete problems: integrating its network with SpaceX’s, and finding capacity in its own spectrum. No operator has spare spectrum, “so you should find some area from your spectrum which will be reformed and redeployed on satellite constellation, and definitely it creates some kind of new architecture — hybrid architecture.” Customers use terrestrial most of the time and are switched to satellite automatically when something happens, and Kyivstar has watched that work through the blackouts of recent months. The constraint is physical — “technology works if you have open sky” — but the on-ramp is as simple as it gets. “Your phone can be registered automatically. You don’t need to choose any other SIM card or new SIM card or new devices. Any smartphone which supports 4G LTE works perfectly.” His message to operators was about posture: resisting and struggling against new technologies is probably the wrong way.
What wartime usage taught Kyivstar that a lab could not is captured in the numbers. SMS launched for the entire smartphone base during a period of massive blackouts: more than three million registered unique users within a month — more than 10% of the customer base — and daily usage of more than half a million customers during blackouts. Adoption continued as blackouts eased, supported by extra coverage in the regions and the mountains, and the launch of light data accelerated it as customers began receiving Viber and WhatsApp messages and using Google Maps. “For already full nine months of usage, we have 7.5 million unique customers.” At Mobile World Congress in March, he recalled, Ukraine led every other market in Starlink adoption, and the number has more than doubled since; more than 10 million SMS have been delivered through the constellation, messages “initiated by real customers for their real typical life needs.” Capacity remains the binding constraint — about 650 satellites serve the service today, with new launches announced for next year — while B2B use cases have multiplied across payment terminals, ATMs, logistics and police. The example he chose was mundane and telling — “you come to the store and you cannot pay because your phone is not online” — a problem Kyivstar is working on with partner Mastercard, which has brought satellite connectivity into its payment infrastructure.
His advice to operators came in three parts. First, define the value: understand which pain points you are trying to address. Satellite will never match terrestrial speed — “you cannot compete with such a speed of mobile internet” — but an operator can become an entirely new kind of trusted partner, the one SIM or eSIM on a customer’s phone “who can save your life,” so operators must manage expectations precisely. Second, do not resist innovation: a company that does loses sight of the products and services that are coming. “You cannot plan your future services. You start slowing down.” Kyivstar describes itself as a digital services provider with a telecom license, and its ride-hailing, insurance and other apps do not work without connectivity, satellite included; operators should identify the ecosystem of critical apps that government and business need available in any situation. Third, partner with the device giants. Apple’s ecosystem, Google’s Android and others are also part of this journey, and their customers are adopting satellite connectivity rapidly. “If you are not supporting,” he warned, customers will one day find “another provider who is covering satellite and non-satellite.” The case for NTN as a resilience layer has rarely been made more concretely. It was made in the gap between a hiker’s SOS and a payment terminal at a shop door, and in the choice of an operator with a solid terrestrial network to add the satellite layer anyway. The open question, for Kyivstar and for every operator reading these numbers from outside Ukraine, is how long that layer stays an add-on before it has to be designed into the network itself.
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