As satellite operators and their telecom partners face rapidly expanding needs for ground infrastructure that is more flexible, more resilient, and more diverse, Orange Wholesale is launching LiveSpace Ground Segment, an integrated, tailor-made, and scalable ground segment offer.
Samy Nicolas Bouchalat
Head of Space Network Solutions, Orange Wholesale International
In 2025, a single ground antenna connected to an average of 1.43 satellites. By 2030, this ratio will reach 1 to 3.
As Samy Nicolas Bouchalat, Head of Space Network Solutions at Orange Wholesale International, points out:
"Today, the pace at which new ground segments are being built bears no comparison to the pace of satellite launches, which now happen by the hundreds, even thousands at a time. The need is therefore very real, even if it is complex. We estimate that by 2030, this entire market will be worth €5.7 billion."
And as Michaël Trabbia, CEO of Orange Wholesale, puts it: "While satellites are in space, customers are on Earth."
Despite this growing infrastructure gap, the diversification of technological and business models — whether LEO, MEO, GEO constellations or various hybrid combinations — continues to accelerate. Some vertically integrated satellite operators are only looking for satellite gateway hosting in a selected geography, along with power, fiber, and integration with their network points of presence. Others expect geographically distributed, trusted hosting, a complete teleport, resilient backhaul, and complete cloud interconnection. This diversification mirrors the widening range of end-user needs, linked to Earth observation, broadcasting, government, as well as telecommunications.
The goal of LiveSpace Ground Segment is to disrupt satellite ground connectivity infrastructure delivery models, adapting them to this new paradigm and its related requirements:
Given this context, LiveSpace Ground Segment is necessarily a non-standardized set of ground segment solutions connecting satellites in orbit to terrestrial networks. As part of the Orange LiveSpace portfolio of satellite connectivity solutions, LiveSpace Ground Segment is aimed at satellite or telecom operators seeking flexible, scalable, and secure connectivity, without the burden of owning or managing their own infrastructure.
"It is always necessarily a tailor-made offer that adapts to each client's needs. We have simply identified essential building blocks and put them forward," explains Samy Nicolas Bouchalat.
Core services of the LiveSpace Ground Segment package include:
One of the offer's key differentiators lies in its ability to propose tailor-made economic models. Samy Nicolas Bouchalat gives several examples: "For one client, we built a teleport and provide the operational management of the site. With another, we are co-investing to finance the construction of a gateway, and that client then pays us on a pay-per-use basis for communications with its constellation only. With a third client, communication is directed at multiple targets, since it's about Earth observation. We're even considering building telescopes for laser communications! In business terms, all these models are 'As-a-Service.' And the future of space communications lies in 'As-a-Service.'"
The goal of LiveSpace Ground Segment is to provide an integrated, scalable framework capable of adapting to each client's growth trajectory, in a rapidly changing technological environment.
Indeed, the emergence of inter-satellite laser links is far from reducing the critical importance of ground segments, according to Samy Nicolas Bouchalat: "Take the example of laser communications and overflow needs — space communications that are themselves complementary to terrestrial cable links and mobile networks form an increasingly complex whole. In my view, the orchestration of these virtualized, hybrid networks, and the automation of that orchestration, are tomorrow's challenges."
Constantly evolving, the ground segment market brings together, in the broadest sense, all the ground infrastructure needed to operate the space telecommunications system connecting satellites and Earth, against a backdrop of fast-changing commercial dynamics.
A ground station is the basic system used to connect to a satellite network, made up of an antenna and a modem or hub.
A gateway is the set-up that receives satellite traffic and connects it to the terrestrial network: it includes the antenna, the hub, and the conversion and interconnection functions toward the backbone.
A teleport is a larger facility, bringing together multiple antennas, multiple gateways, and multiple network interconnection points for different clients and constellations.
Ground segment, finally, encompasses this entire chain — gateways, teleports, end users, orchestration, cloud, cybersecurity, encryption, customer portals, and monitoring — required to operate the space system all the way through to the end customer.
The higher the frequency, the narrower the beam, which multiplies the number of gateways required. A traditional GEO satellite requires 1 to 5 sites, a High Throughput GEO satellite 5 to 20, a MEO constellation 8 to 20, and a LEO constellation up to 20 to 100 sites or more, using smaller but far more numerous antennas, to ensure continuous coverage despite the satellites' fast movement.
Yes, for both technical and commercial reasons:
While the traditional model relies on dedicated, rigid hardware that is costly to upgrade, the "software-defined" model detaches functions from hardware and moves them to virtual machines or the cloud. The RF signal is digitized right at the antenna and then routed like standard IP traffic, allowing a single antenna to serve multiple missions and reducing OpEx by up to 30%.
