BARCELONA—The satellite-to-phone broadband firm with the biggest to-do list checked off one notable item during MWC when it announced a deal with Vodafone to provide service across Europe. But another task remains: Getting 40 more satellites into low Earth orbit to inaugurate commercial service for partners that include AT&T and Verizon.
In a Wednesday interview here, Scott Wisniewski, president and chief strategy officer at AST, walked through the firm’s next steps to bring satellite roaming to existing phones.
SatCo, the joint venture AST will create with Vodafone, will see that wireless carrier build out a set of ground stations to link AST’s satellites with mobile networks across Europe. “We’re more deeply integrated into their network than others who are developing add-on tech services,” Wisniewski said. He added that AST will not be making a capital contribution to Vodafone’s work on the ground and plans to split revenue 50/50 with that company.
He also noted one bonus for Europeans anxious about the large role of US tech firms on the continent: “One side effect of that is the traffic goes up, the traffic goes down, but it all stays within the country.”
From conversations here, those concerns have ratcheted up in just the last month, thanks to the Trump administration’s transactional approach to foreign relations and Elon Musk’s dual roles as SpaceX CEO and White House henchman.
Wisniewski acknowledged those concerns but described SatCo as a key step in ensuring broader “European sovereignty.” As he put it: “Political environments come and go, but having a solution that’s European is important, and that’s what we’re trying to create with Vodafone here.”
AST is also preparing to follow up on its successful September launch of the first five BlueBird satellites. AST used a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for that mission, but its next launch will take place in India. It will also use Blue Origin’s large New Glenn rocket to speed up its delivery.
“We made contracts in a diversified way,” Wisniewski said of AST’s approach to securing launch services. “We’re counting on Blue Origin, and they’ve done a great job so far.”
The massive payload fairing of New Glenn, which had a successful debut in January, is particularly appealing to AST because its BlueBird satellites are so large. “It can support up to 8 satellites each,” he said.
These spacecraft—some 2,400 square feet each—are designed to support far more devices than SpaceX’s tiny Starlink satellites. AST says that will allow it to begin offering service with 45 in space and reach a first buildout with 60.
Wisniewski pushed back against skepticism such as a potshot on X from Ben Longmier, senior director for satellite engineering at SpaceX, who suggested AST customers would have “tens of minutes” between working connections. Wisniewski said those first 45 satellites would allow “continuous service” in latitudes across the US, Europe, and Japan.
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“We’ve tested and demonstrated about 20Mbps,” he said of AST’s downloads. Uploads will be “about half as good as the downlink,” which in past testing has supported video calling via space.
Sometime over those next 40 satellites, AST plans to cut over to including the custom ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) that it developed to maximize capacity. The simpler processor on earlier-build satellites will allow the same coverage but will leave satellites with about half the network capacity of the ASIC, which he said is “checking out as designed.”
In the US, AST may be facing a much larger change to its in-space hardware as a result of a January deal to acquire satellite-specific radio spectrum from the bankrupt firm Ligado Networks. That L-band spectrum doesn’t require new regulatory authorization and could allow AST to sell service direct to customers. But unlike AST’s current offering, this spectrum requires specific hardware in phones (which is why Globalstar’s satellite messaging for iPhones, also delivered via satellite-specific spectrum, only works on recent models) and new hardware in orbit.
“It’s the same satellite design, but the active payload is changed a little bit,” Wisniewski said of possible L-band satellites. But first the company has to spin up service for AT&T and Verizon and see those carriers get paying customers.
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