SYDNEY — In a statement released Thursday, February 19, 2026, NBN Co launched an industry consultation on wholesale pricing for its upcoming residential Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite service, powered by Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper).

The move is a strategic attempt to lock in regional customers before a full-scale migration from the aging Sky Muster geostationary (GEO) fleet begins later this year.

The government-owned wholesaler is proposing an aggressive “introductory” price tier for existing satellite customers who upgrade early. Under the proposal, a new 50/10 Mbps LEO plan would be offered to retailers at a wholesale price of $35.84 per month—a rate designed to be equal to or lower than current Sky Muster Plus pricing.

Strategic Migration and “Amazon Leo” Integration

The partnership with Amazon, first announced in August 2025, positions NBN Co to compete directly with SpaceX’s Starlink, which currently dominates the Australian LEO market. Key parameters of the transition include:

• Consolidated Tiers: NBN Co plans to fold its existing 12/1 Mbps and 25/5 Mbps Sky Muster tiers into a single 50/10 Mbps LEO-based service.
• Hardware Incentives: To accelerate the shift, NBN Co is proposing to provide and install the new Amazon Leo receiving equipment at no cost to eligible existing customers.
• Footprint: The service is expected to cover approximately 300,000 users in regional, rural, and remote Australia who lack access to fixed-line or fixed-wireless infrastructure.

Technical Performance and Resilience

The shift to Amazon Leo’s LEO constellation—which currently has more than 150 satellites in orbit and is scaling toward a 3,200-satellite mesh network—will provide significantly lower latency compared to the 600ms+ delay inherent in GEO satellites.

“We want all eligible customers, delivery partners and regional communities to be ready for a smooth transition,” said Gavin Williams, NBN Co Chief Development Officer, Regional & Remote. He noted that the LEO service is designed to deliver “city-fast” broadband to the most remote areas of the continent.

Timeline to 2030

NBN Co has established a multi-year roadmap for the complete decommissioning of its legacy satellite infrastructure.

1. July – September 2026: Proof-of-concept trials are scheduled to begin in Tasmania.
2. Q4 2026: Expected commencement of the full commercial rollout.
3. Q4 2027: Deadline for the bulk of customer migrations to the LEO network.
4. 2028 – 2030: Decommissioning of the two Sky Muster geostationary satellites, which are projected to reach end-of-life by the early 2030s.

Ellie Sweeney, CEO of NBN Co, emphasized that this transition is critical to ensuring the network remains “future-ready” and resilient. While Sky Muster will continue to operate until at least 2028 to ensure continuity, the company is already exploring options for the legacy assets once the transition to Amazon’s LEO network is finalized.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — In a statement released Wednesday, February 18, 2026, MTN Satellite Communications (MTN) announced it has reached an agreement with SpaceX to become an authorized provider of SpaceX’s government-specific satellite connectivity ecosystem.

The agreement allows MTN to integrate SpaceX’s specialized government Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation—distinct from the standard commercial Starlink service—into its managed network offerings. This ecosystem is designed to meet the high-assurance security and resiliency requirements of defense, government, and energy sector clients.

Government-Grade Specifications and Hardware

Under the terms of the deal, MTN will deploy specialized user equipment tailored for military use cases, including secure Command and Control (C2) and Earth Observation. Key technical differentiators of the government-focused service include:

• High-Assurance Cryptography: Security protocols designed for classified operations and sensitive data processing that exceed standard commercial encryption.
• Proliferated LEO Architecture: Utilization of SpaceX’s densified constellation to ensure signal redundancy and resilience for mobile platforms in contested environments.
• Ruggedized Deployment: MTN is launching a specialized version of its MTN Rugged Mini Kit, an all-in-one portable deployment system modified specifically for field-based government operations.

Executive Perspective

“The addition of this government-focused ecosystem from SpaceX is a crucial differentiator for MTN,” said Scott Davis, President and CEO of MTN Government Solutions. “Our aerospace, defense and government clients demand connectivity that is not just fast and global, but 100% secure and highly resilient. This move enables us to deliver communications with the highest assurance levels, perfectly complementing our existing Starlink-based commercial solutions.”

Immediate Rollout and Integration

The new services are being integrated immediately into MTN’s existing government and defense portfolio. This rollout follows the recent launch of MTN’s StarEdge Horizon, a Layer 2-based private network. While StarEdge Horizon manages enterprise traffic over commercial Starlink, this new SpaceX agreement provides the military-grade hardware and orbital priority required for mission-critical continuity at sea or in remote terrestrial sites.

Addressing the critical challenge of increasing orbital congestion, SpaceX has officially unveiled “Stargaze,” a novel Space Situational Awareness (SSA) system designed to enhance the safety of the low Earth orbit (LEO) environment.

Stargaze utilizes the existing hardware on the Starlink constellation to track thousands of objects in near real-time, offering a significant upgrade over traditional ground-based radar systems.

A New Approach to Orbital Monitoring

Traditional Space Situational Awareness (SSA) relies heavily on ground-based sensors that observe satellites only a few times per day, often leading to large uncertainties in orbital predictions. By contrast, Stargaze leverages the nearly 30,000 star trackers distributed across the Starlink fleet. These sensors, originally designed for satellite orientation, now perform continuous observations of nearby objects, detecting approximately 30 million transits daily. This creates a dense, constantly refreshed map of LEO activity, allowing for the identification of potential collisions within minutes rather than hours.

Technical Performance and Collision Avoidance

The Stargaze platform autonomously aggregates observations to generate precise orbit estimates and predictions. A key feature is the generation of Conjunction Data Messages (CDMs) at a frequency previously unattainable in the industry.

• Detection Frequency: 30 million transits per day across the fleet.
• Latency: Conjunction screening results delivered within minutes.
• Maneuver Detection: The system can identify uncoordinated maneuvers by third-party satellites—a capability demonstrated in late 2025 when Stargaze allowed a Starlink satellite to avoid a collision with an uncooperative spacecraft with only five hours’ notice.
• Data Sharing: SpaceX is offering these screening results free of charge to any operator that submits its own ephemeris (trajectory) data to the platform.

Rationale: Mitigating the Risk of Orbital Debris

The launch of Stargaze comes as LEO becomes increasingly crowded with active satellites, spent rocket stages, and orbital debris. Irresponsible practices, such as anti-satellite tests or failing to share trajectory predictions, have heightened the risk of the Kessler Syndrome—a chain reaction of collisions. By providing a transparent, low-latency data layer, SpaceX aims to motivate other operators toward collaborative flight safety and more rigorous de-confliction.

Targeting the growing gap in data regarding on-the-go satellite internet usage, TRIO Flatmount released its 2026 Mobile Starlink Survey on February 17. The report, which compiled data from approximately 600 users, indicates a significant pivot in how mobile satellite terminals are utilized, moving away from purely recreational use toward essential income generation.

Shifting Demographics and Use Cases

The survey found that nearly half of respondents (47%) now depend on mobile connectivity for remote work or professional income. While leisure use remains a factor, the professionalization of mobile connectivity is the primary driver for recent hardware adoption.

The most common deployment environments for these mobile users include:

• Recreational Vehicles (RVs): 37%
• Marine Vessels: 15%
• Van Builds: 11%
• Passenger Vehicles: 10%

Geographic and Economic Factors

Geographically, the Western and Southern United States account for the majority of users (55%). However, a significant international presence is emerging, with 25% of respondents residing in Canada, Australia, Europe, or operating at sea.

One of the most striking findings in the 2026 data is the inelasticity of price regarding hardware and service. According to the report, 85% of respondents stated that price was not a primary factor in their purchasing decision. This suggests that reliability and the ability to maintain “office-like” connectivity in remote regions outweigh the cost of equipment and monthly subscriptions for the majority of the mobile workforce.

Rationale for Specialized Hardware

The surge in professional use has increased the demand for ruggedized, in-motion mounting solutions. Users cite the need for “park-and-play” or “drive-and-play” capabilities as essential to meeting work deadlines while traveling. This data aligns with the broader industry trend of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations becoming the primary infrastructure for the global “digital nomad” economy.

Comparative Service Utilization: Land vs. Marine

Additional analysis reveals a stark contrast in service plan preferences between maritime and land-based users, driven primarily by geographic restrictions and data priority requirements.

The survey data indicates that while land-based users (RVs at 37%, Van builds at 11%) predominantly utilize the Roam Unlimited plan ($165/mo), maritime users (15%) are increasingly opting for Global Priority tiers despite significantly higher costs. This disparity is tied to Starlink’s “Ocean Mode” requirements, which mandate metered priority data for vessels operating beyond territorial waters.

Economic Disparity in Service Plans:

• Land-Based Mobile: $165/month for unlimited “Best Effort” data.
• Maritime/Coastal: Starts at $250/month for 50GB of “Global Priority” data.
• High-Demand Marine: Scales to $2,150/month for 2TB of priority data.

Rationale for High-Cost Adoption

The finding that 85% of users do not view price as a primary factor is particularly evident in the maritime sector. For the 47% of respondents who depend on Starlink for remote income, the “Global Priority” plan is viewed as a business necessity rather than a luxury. Marine users reported a higher willingness to pay for “Priority Data” to ensure sub-second latency for video conferencing and cloud-based applications, which are often throttled on the standard land-based Roam plans during peak congestion.

Outlook for 2026 Infrastructure

The survey coincides with Starlink’s 2026 service upgrades, which introduce the “Performance Kit” capable of 400+ Mbps. TRIO’s data suggests that as mobile connectivity evolves, the market is splitting into two distinct tiers: recreational “Roam” users and professional “Priority” users, with the latter group driving the demand for specialized flatmount hardware to support in-motion operations.

By Abbey White, Staff Writer, SatNews

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Coverage and analysis from across the conference, tracking the forces shaping the next phase of the SmallSat market.

MOUNTAIN VIEW. The free drinks at SmallSat Symposium usually signal a celebration, but this year they feel more like a necessity. If 2024 was the year of the press release, early 2026 is the year of the hangover. Breathless promises of ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity from space have collided with a formidable wall of physics, finance, and federal regulation.

The mood inside the Computer History Museum is no longer defined by the novelty of connecting a smartphone to a satellite. That magic trick has been performed. Now, as the industry gathers for the session Cracking the D2D Code: Engineering Solutions to Power, Doppler & Spectrum Locks, the conversation shifts to a brutal realization. Making it work once is science, but making it pay is a nightmare.

Presiding over this reality check was Dr. Tim Farrar of TMF Associates, the industry’s designated contrarian. The panel’s title promised engineering solutions, but the subtext was an admission that the easy part (sending a text message) is done. The hard part (voice and broadband) is stuck in what engineers call a spectrum lock and what investors might soon call a money pit.

The Space Heater Problem

The central tension in the room is the battle between proprietary systems like Starlink, which attempt to muscle through terrestrial spectrum, and standards-based players like Iridium and Skylo who advocate for playing by the rules of physics.

Greg Pelton, CTO of Iridium, did not mince words about the inefficiency of trying to deliver service without dedicated global spectrum. He described the absurdity of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites flying over countries where they lack landing rights, effectively turning expensive hardware into orbiting junk for half their orbit.

“You’ve got this massive space heater running across the sky,” Pelton said. “Now I’m over this piece of land for 15 or 30 minutes, I can offer service. Then I’m shut off again.”

It was a stark illustration of the regulatory handcuffs that bind so-called supplemental coverage strategies. If you cannot clear the spectrum globally, you cannot scale the business globally.

The Meat Filter

Beyond the regulatory headaches, the panel exposed the raw physical limitations of trying to close a link budget with a device that was never designed for space. The unmodified phone is the holy grail of the direct-to-device (D2D) market. To an RF engineer, however, it is a disaster.

Pelton highlighted the Power Lock facing the sector. He noted that while LEO satellites provide better look angles than their geostationary ancestors, they cannot change the fact that consumer hardware is inept at shouting 500 kilometers upwards.

“The antennas on cell phones are terrible,” Pelton argued. “And the ones on watches are even worse.”

He described the interference caused by the human body itself (the user holding the phone) as “a big meat filter” that the signal is going through. This biological barrier, combined with the lack of gain on standard smartphone antennas, suggests that the dream of high-bandwidth data might require hardware upgrades that consumers aren’t ready to buy.

The Billion-Dollar Question

This physical pushback leads inevitably to financial friction. The industry has spent billions launching constellations on the premise of a trillion-dollar connectivity market, yet the panelists were hesitant to validate those spreadsheets.

When pressed on the actual market size, responses were sobering. The days of forecasting infinite growth are over.

“Is it a $1 billion market globally, is it a $100 billion market globally?” Pelton asked. “We don’t know that yet, and we’re not going to know for a few more years.”

Farrar, never one to let a valuation bubble float by unpopped, twisted the knife. He pointed out the fundamental disconnect between the utility of the service and the willingness of the customer to pay for it. Emergency SOS, though valuable, is rarely monetizable as a standalone subscription.

“I love the fact that if I fall over and break my leg when I’m out hiking, I know I can get some help,” Farrar said. “But I’m not paying anything for it either.”

The Intel Inside Moment

Despite the gloom regarding consumer broadband, a quiet revolution is occurring in the supply chain. The merger of Cobham Satcom and Gatehouse Satcom represents a shift toward industrialization of the sector, moving away from bespoke science project architectures toward standardized infrastructure.

Jesper Noer, representing the newly merged entity, emphasized that the engineering solutions to Doppler shifts and timing advances are now commercial products (NodeBs in the sky) rather than proprietary secrets. But even he conceded that the industry needs to stop fighting over proprietary stacks.

“A dream scenario for me would if people stopped doing their proprietary technologies on top and really join forces on the standardization efforts,” Noer said.

The Verdict

The session concluded not with a roadmap to 5G broadband from space but with a pivot toward the unsexy reliability of Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Vijay Krishnan of Skylo pointed to the 13 million devices already on their network as proof that the dam has in some ways already burst for low-bandwidth messaging and asset tracking.

But for the blue ocean consumer who wants to watch Netflix in the middle of the Pacific? That ship hasn’t just sailed; it likely never existed.

As the panelists left the stage, Farrar offered a final, sarcastic reality check regarding the seamless roaming that billionaires like Elon Musk have promised. When Noer suggested that roaming partners were just a marketing term that needed to be solved technically, Farrar didn’t miss the beat.

“I’ll let you go and tell Elon Musk that tomorrow then,” Farrar deadpanned.

The laughter in the room was genuine, but it was the nervous laughter of an industry realizing that the laws of physics, unlike the FCC, cannot be lobbied.

By Abbey White, Staff Writer, SatNews

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Coverage and analysis from across the conference, tracking the forces shaping the next phase of the SmallSat market.

MOUNTAIN VIEW. Rockets still make a lot of noise, but the revolution visible at the SmallSat Symposium moves silently, digitally, and at the speed of code. For decades “metal benders”—those massive aerospace conglomerates that first weld titanium and then figure out the flight computer—have defined the space industry. That era is officially obsolete.

During a riveting Fireside Chat between Milbank partner Dara Panahy and Victoria Coleman of the Berkeley Space Center, the industry received a new engineering manifesto. The breakthrough isn’t a new propulsion system or a lighter alloy but a fundamental inversion of a design process that no longer builds hardware that happens to have software but instead deploys orbiting servers wrapped in solar panels.

The Software-First Paradigm

Coleman, an innovation veteran whose career spans the Air Force, DARPA, and Intel, pinpointed exactly why Silicon Valley is overtaking the traditional defense base. The secret sauce isn’t just capital; it is the mindset of the software engineer applied to the unforgiving physics of space.

“In the Valley here, what we’re going to build is a hub for new space tech,” Coleman declared. “Where we build the software first and put metal around it, versus the other way around, which is what’s being done by our colleagues in Southern California. I think there is magic in that.”

This is the transformation Panahy asked for, a radical shift allowing for iteration speeds previously thought impossible in aerospace. By prioritizing software-defined architectures, companies can update capabilities on orbit, patch vulnerabilities in real time, and integrate AI-driven decision-making at the edge. It creates the difference between a flip phone and an iPhone: one is a static tool, the other an evolving platform.

Solving the Speed Limit

This engineering philosophy is the only reason the Pentagon’s ambitious Golden Dome missile defense architecture has a fighting chance. Research briefings reveal a staggering $175 billion earmarked for missile defense over the next three years. Yet money alone can’t buy speed. The traditional acquisition cycle, often taking ten years to deliver a perfect satellite, is incompatible with the modern threat environment.

The solution is the unapologetically commercial approach pioneered by the Space Development Agency (SDA) and championed by Coleman. Instead of bespoke Ferraris, the industry is building reliable, software-driven Fords capable of deployment in swarms.

“The SDA was first and foremost unapologetically commercial,” Coleman noted.

This technical breakthrough—specifically, the ability to proliferate rapid commercial-grade hardware—is solving the industry’s biggest bottleneck: resilience. By leveraging the speed of commercial innovation, the US is finally building an architecture that can survive a punch. The Golden Dome isn’t just a shield. It is a distributed network of commercial innovation plugged directly into national defense.

The Reactor Core

To make this vision operational, the industry is building a physical engine. The Berkeley Space Center, a $2 billion collaboration between UC-Berkeley and NASA Ames, represents the engineering puzzle’s final piece: “the collision space.”

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens when you crash a doctoral student in AI into a startup founder and a Space Force procurement officer. Coleman described the center not just as a campus but as a translation layer designed to bridge the gap between cool tech and mission utility.

“We bring the students, we bring the faculty, we bring the startups, we bring the established companies,” Coleman explained.

This ecosystem approach is designed to bypass the infamous Valley of Death not by throwing money at the problem but by ensuring that technology is hardened, relevant, and integrated from day one. It creates a feedback loop where academic brilliance is immediately tested against commercial reality.

The Future is Bright (and Fast)

The mood in Mountain View is electric. The old guard’s monopoly on status quo operations has been shattered by a new generation that views a satellite as just another node in a network. Hardware is getting cheaper, software is getting smarter, and the innovation Coleman predicted is already visible on the show floor.

The industry is moving toward a future with “a little bit more coherence” and limitless potential, Panahy concluded. The sky is no longer the limit. The sky is just the next server room, to which Silicon Valley for the first time holds the keys to the door.

By Abbey White, Staff Writer, SatNews

Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Coverage and analysis from across the conference, tracking the forces shaping the next phase of the SmallSat market.

From Sandbox to Shield: The SmallSat Industry Grows Up

MOUNTAIN VIEW. If the mood at past SmallSat Symposiums was defined by exuberant experimentation, this year feels different. The energy has not vanished, but it has matured. During the session Engineering the Future Spacecraft, a clear signal emerged from the noise: the industry is graduating. Focus has shifted from the novelty of New Space to the serious, high-stakes business of national infrastructure and defense.

The practice of launching science projects to see what sticks is fading. In its place rises a drive for reliability, scale, and sovereign capability. As Peter Krauss, CEO of Terran Orbital, noted, “The days of flying things that are TRL 0… are over.”

The Bar Has Been Raised

This transition is not about shutting out innovation but professionalizing it. The customers driving the market today, primarily major defense primes and government agencies, demand a rigor that early startups often overlooked.

Krauss illustrated this shift by describing the industry’s talent gap. “You’re interviewing a 25-year-old, you want them to have a master’s degree and 10 years of work experience,” he said. His humorous exaggeration underscored a serious point regarding the expectation for day-one competence. Jan Smolders of Space Inventor captured this evolution perfectly, arguing, “It’s not a tech market anymore. It’s a delivery market.”

Engineering hurdles are no longer about just making something work in a vacuum. They are about manufacturing a product repeatedly, reliably, on time. The Golden Dome missile defense initiative referenced in the research serves as prime example, demanding an industrial base capable of churning out assets at a pace that boutique manufacturing simply cannot match.

Sovereignty Over Hype

While the conference floor still buzzes with talk of orbital data centers and edge computing, the panelists brought the conversation back to geopolitical realities. When asked about near-term value drivers, Rusty Thomas, CEO of EnduroSat USA, steered the room away from speculation, stating, “What’s not going to unlock value in the next three years for any of us is data centers in space.”

Instead, Thomas highlighted the urgent need for resilient communications in an unstable world. “Sovereigns who want to have a resilient communication capability—countries in the Pacific who might get their cable undersea cables cut on a bad day—are still going to need to talk,” he explained. As global supply chains fracture, the ability to control one’s own communications infrastructure is becoming a critical asset.

The Integration Debate

As the industry scales to meet these defense and sovereign needs, a debate is forming around the best path forward. Tina Ghataore of Aerospacelab described a vertical approach born from the need to secure a fragile supply chain. “We’ve had to pay for the roadmap,” she noted, explaining her company’s move to bring component manufacturing in-house.

In contrast, Rusty Thomas advocated for a model where customers leverage existing buses rather than building from scratch. He argued against past inefficiencies, suggesting that “companies don’t need to spend $10-20 billion” to build a constellation when the infrastructure already exists.

A New Era of Seriousness

The mood in Mountain View is not pessimistic but pragmatic. The industry is moving away from the move-fast-and-break-things era and entering a phase of industrial resilience.

The Strategic Edge is no longer just about having the most advanced sensor. It requires a supply chain that can survive geopolitical friction and a production line that can deliver at volume. The romance of the early days has not disappeared, but it has been replaced by the satisfaction of building something that truly works and matters on a global scale.