I was privileged to have the opportunity to attend the European Space Agency (ESA) workshop in Paris recently, to discuss direct to device connectivity in Europe. It is clear that interest in 5G Satellite (NTN) services is hotting up in Europe in just the same way as it is in the rest of the world. Discussions at the event showed a strong demand for services from consumers, industry and government, although most attendees agreed there isn’t single group or application that presents a compelling business case currently.
As well as the predictable desire to have multiple providers to ensure a competitive market, there is also a call from the industry for a sovereign European capability rather than relying on service from global constellations that are, ultimately, controlled from outside of Europe. This requirement highlights the challenge that, whilst there is no shortage of technological innovation and leadership in Europe, there are very few, if any, players of a suitable scale to provide a complete solution on their own.
The solution then is clearly going to be based around cooperation and partnerships, which is an approach we here at AccelerComm are very familiar with. Our partnership with Radisys, for example, allows us to jointly provide a complete gNB solution, and our compliance with 3GPP, O-RAN and SCF standards simplifies working with other ecosystem partners.
We are excited to see that, whilst some of the spectrum issues that limit commercial deployments of a Europe-wide solution are resolved over the next year or two, the ESA will be enabling some of those partnerships so that Europe is ready, with cutting edge technology, when that spectrum work is complete.
Key to building a system in partnership is a common platform capable of hosting components from multiple vendors. Whilst AccelerComm’s solutions are developed to be platform independent, we have also been focussing on demonstrating them on some of the most common embedded silicon used in satellite onboard processors, comprising space hardened arm cores, vector processing cores and programmable logic (FPGA) resources.
Clearly there are exciting times ahead for the European space sector when it comes to 5G. We’ve already solved some of the key challenges of regenerative NTN networks and we’re looking forward to partnering with the ecosystem and continuing to innovate as the technology moves out of the lab and into the real world.
If you’d like to learn more about the solutions we have available today, and our plans for the future, come and talk to us. We’re at both MWC 2025 in Barcelona and Satellite 2025 in Washington. Click here to find out more.