Monday, September 15th, 2025, found your analyst attending Deutsche Telekom’s 2025 Satellite Day, at their headquarters in Bonn. Also in attendance were perhaps 200 folks drawn from satellite, wider telecommunications, and end-user adopter industries.
Deutsche Telekom has adopted satellite as a strategic focus and as part of their vision of being the ‘leading digital telecommunications provider’, to support a full range of IoT, wider enterprise, and consumer propositions. The aim is for their combined satellite and terrestrial networks to work together in a seamless, borderless and truly converged way, supporting ‘connectivity everywhere’.
In this context, satellite is viewed as a complement for traditional terrestrial networks, rather than a substitute. A particular focus is support for IoT, with the view expressed that there is no other business in which it is so crucial to be able to support connections in remote and rural areas. Currently, the company targets broadband IoT for critical infrastructure (such as solar farms) in partnership with SES, and for vehicles in partnership with Viasat using the latter’s L-Band spectrum which is more stable in harsh weather conditions. For narrowband IoT, services are currently live with Skylo (using geostationary satellites) and OQ Technologies and Sateliot (both using low-earth orbiting satellites). Iridium is planned to soon become a fourth narrowband satellite roaming partner (edit: this was in fact announced the following day, 16 September).
T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom’s subsidiary in the United States) is also focussing heavily on satellite, observing that the land area of the United States that is currently not covered by terrestrial cellular networks is equivalent to ‘three Germanys’. Since launching the T-Satellite Direct-to-Cell (i.e. direct to handset) service in late July, 1.2 million customers have connected via satellite, with 1 million text messages sent and 3 million received. The T-Satellite proposition is viewed as a key draw to bring new subscribers to T-Mobile.
Meanwhile, back in Germany and to support the development of satellite markets, Deutsche Telekom has established an early-adopter programme, including support for the development of devices, antennas, and software. The first IoT solution to emerge supported by Deutsche Telekom is Digitanimal’s cow tracker. In automotive markets, first steps are with NB-NTN (i.e. 5G NB-IoT over non-terrestrial networks), specifically demonstrated with BMW and both Skylo and Viasat. The first cars with satellite connections onboard are expected to hit the market in around two years.
A key theme of the event was that historically the satellite market has been characterised by multiple companies ‘all doing their own thing’, but the advent of 3GPP NTN (the 3rd Generation Partnership Project’s Non-Terrestrial Networking initiative) has resulted in standardisation and alignment within the industry. As observed at the event, ‘it takes a village to drive customer demand’.
In this context, it was interesting to note the major announcement of the event, which is that Deutsche Telekom has contracted with SpaceX so that they can resell Starlink connectivity to their business customers. SpaceX is, of course, a company that very much does its own thing, but it was recognised as being able to provide a managed satellite IP connection better than anyone else. In general, managed and turnkey solutions were viewed as crucial to drive adoption. An initial focus will be to offer connections to existing Deutsche Telekom customers with operations outside Germany. Key markets for Deutsche Telekom’s Starlink service are viewed as falling into three categories including the provision of redundant or back-up connectivity, temporary connections (such as to construction sites, or until fixed connections have been installed), and ‘white spaces’ that cannot be connected by terrestrial networks.
Looking to the future, it was expected that more consumer-centric services and applications would be optimised for satellite, with any mobile subscriber being able to connect to emergency services via satellite. Reciprocal roaming using satellite networks was anticipated, as were more and heavier data services. Skylo, for its part, was surprised that 30% of data traffic thus far has been enterprise traffic, and the company expected that NTN connectivity would be standard in all cars in 2-3 years’ time. Skylo further identified two distinct aspects of the market for automotive satellite connectivity, including the extreme robustness of NB-NTN being ‘what saves your life’ and the ‘extreme accessibility’ of higher bandwidth services (New Radio, or NR-NTN) for provision of services. In both cases, the company noted that the SLAs attached to automotive connectivity were an ‘order of magnitude’ more challenging than those for consumer services and also that vehicles could be expected to remain on the roads and require consistent connectivity for many years.
Recent reports from Transforma Insights looking at the satellite market include:
And more reports ude in the coming few weeks. Watch this space.
