Telco and digital service provider Orange has cut the ribbon on the first European gateway for the Telesat Lightspeed constellation.
Using optical inter-satellite links, the Telesat Lightspeed network is being designed to enable customer traffic to remain in space until it is securely delivered to a Telesat landing station or a customer’s private landing facility. The result is said to be enhanced data sovereignty, routing flexibility and control for enterprise, government and defence users.
The gateway includes antennas supplied by IntellianTechnologies, supporting the network’s high-capacity, low-latency architecture. The teleport is a key component of Orange’s global connectivity network, the Bercenay-en-Othe site will play a role in delivering tailored, reliable and low-latency connectivity services. Overall, Orange has ground stations in 26 countries and territories worldwide.
In addition, Telesat Lightspeed Carrier Ethernet services will be designed to deliver connectivity that’s backed by service-level agreements so that operators such as Orange can configure and monitor services in real time, redirecting capacity as needed without satellite operator intervention. The enterprise network is also claimed to be able to guarantee a zero-trust security architecture aligned with the latest security industry standards.
Ground segment connectivity will be provided by Orange through a high-speed network connecting the station to a planned point of presence (PoP) in Paris. This is said to deliver the high availability and low latency required for mission-critical applications. Indeed, Telesat told Computer Weekly that the Paris to Bercenay-en-Othe link had a latency of 2ms.
The decision to go to the Orange site was said to be driven by operational excellence, security certifications, and the ability to rapidly integrate cutting-edge technologies. The site, covering as much as 37 hectares, began operations in 1978, and currently has 46 antennas, ranging in size from one metre wide to 32 metres.
Orange executive vice-president of international networks Jean-Louis Le Roux quipped that in the locality, the antennas are regarded as “the ears of the region”.
Tapping into heritage
More seriously, he stressed how Orange has been a provider of space comms services since 1962, and that it was the first to offer a satellite gateway in that decade. The task, he said, would be to tap into that heritage for the modern era of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
“Over the last 10 years, there has been a true revolution with the introduction of low orbit satellite constellation,” said Le Roux. “This is what we call the new space. In the revolution of the new space, we are introducing satellites that are at much lower orbit, at 800km up to 10,000km, so bandwidth is much better, latency is much lower. But the coverage area is lower. So, we need much more satellites, roughly 100, to cover the Earth. This is really the new space, and we see a big increase today. We have roughly 100 terabits of capacity over space, and we plan a huge increase during the next five years. We plan to reach 1,000 terabyte capacity. Orange is a key player to provide positive ground segments for new satellite installations.”
The company currently has roughly 100 people working on satellite in an entity that is called the satellite factory, with 25 people working at Bercenay-en-Othe full-time. Le Roux stated that Orange considers satellite as a true complement of its mobile and submarine networks. Presently, it accounts for only 2% of data traffic, but he stressed that this 2% was “very important” and would grow in a space business for which Orange would remain tech agnostic, providing geostationary, LEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO) offers.
“What we see is traffic growing about 25/30% every year, which is quite amazing,” he said. “Every three years, we double the internet traffic. We see the ratio between satellite and terrestrial as quite stable. This is roughly 2%. If we look at Europe, satellites clearly will come to cover the remote areas, in the mountains for instance, when it is difficult to provide fibres. We see satellite as really complementary, never replacing [other technologies]. If you look at the prices, sometimes we have people ask will satellite replace submarine capacity? There is 1,000 more capacity under the sea than in the space. Both are really complementary, and I think we will keep this complementarity for a while.”
The overarching space business plan is, said the Le Roux, to be the hub of space communication in Europe. In terms of business areas, Orange satellite covers mission-critical applications for governments – connecting French embassies all over the world – and it also has bank customers, power supply and a host of enterprises. To achieve its aims, Le Roux said it was necessary to work with several players and partners. “Telesat is a big one,” he said. “We share the same DNA.”
In business for 58 years, Canada-based trusted satellite provider Telesat serves telecom operators, governments and enterprises. It is designing its Lightspeed satellite network to deliver what it calls “enterprise-grade” connectivity with the security, resilience and performance required for mission-critical operations.
At the site opening, Telesat chief commercial officer Glenn Katz said the firm regarded Orange as a valued strategic partner in its deployment efforts to support the delivery of resilient connectivity using LEO craft that have solved the problem of latency in data-critical applications.
“What this technology can [deliver] is a fully private and secure, dedicated line from one point wherever it is in the world to another point, which can [deliver] specific communication, and no one can intercept that physical transmission because it’s a fully physically dedicated [network],” he said. “The sovereignty of the data, where it goes, where it’s controlled, the physical landing stations can be operated by a sovereign entity, and that can be done anywhere in the world. This is the first time where there’s going to be a fully private physical network connecting one point to the other [from space].”
Katz estimated that looking at all the different use cases in this market – such as consumer, enterprise, mobile backhaul, aviation, maritime, energy and defence – the business opportunity and target adjustable market size could be between $600bn and $1tn. He added that when a market is that big, it becomes much more “rational”, meaning no one company will take over with different technologies and products for different use cases.
But that said, the competitive pressure from existing Starlink services and those from the forthcoming Amazon LEO constellation, he said, would be fierce. That meant having to go to customers with guaranteed levels of service on their business network with Layer 2 Carrier Ethernet.
Talking to Computer Weekly, Katz said the USP when taking on these companies with seemingly endless financial backing would be for customers to regard what Telesat and Orange was doing as “a telephone network, not as a best-effort broadband network in space”.
“It’s that Layer 2 Carrier Ethernet that is the is the technical differentiator between us and others,” he said. “Then you add to that the national sovereign LEO capability and other features, specifically as it gears towards defence. And I’ll add one more thing to that: the system itself is for commercial use, is in the Ka band spectrum of satellites. We recently added [in March 2026] Mil-Ka [military Ka-band], which is a different spectrum.”
Specifically, Telesat added 500 MHz of Mil-Ka spectrum to the initial 156 satellites in its Lightspeed constellation to meet the fast-growing global requirements of allied defence users.
Deployed by Nato and other allies around the world for military communications, Mil-Ka is immediately adjacent to the commercial Ka-band spectrum used by Telesat Lightspeed, which allows the change to be made without adversely impacting schedule and with only a modest impact on cost. The plan is for 500MHz of Mil-Ka to replace the same amount of commercial Ka-band spectrum on the network’s user link, with the gateway link being unaffected by the spectrum change.
This meant a positive business outcome, said Katz. “Lightspeed is now a dual-use technology,” he said. “And one of the bigger proof points of why that’s important is that we announced a contract with the Canadian Armed Forces for a project that they had working over several years to try to provide better, more bandwidth for military purposes in the Arctic for Mil-Ka. That shows you one of the clear differentiators of a system like Lightspeed.
“Two of our big markets that we’re really focusing on is the commercial enterprise space, an enormous market, and the other one is government defence,” he said. “And that’s the proof point for the government. What’s important to understand is we chose purposely to design a system that is specifically designed for enterprise, government and defence.”
