Paris has been buzzing with high-profile visits to World Space Business Week, where hundreds of executives are lining up to launch services.
For Karim Sabbagh, managing director of space technology company Space42, it was an opportunity to pitch a project intended to give the UAE a central role in reshaping communications on Earth using infrastructure in space.
The platform, Equatys, aims to deploy thousands of satellites over several years to provide connectivity for people around the globe through their mobile phone, from central business districts to zones that currently have little coverage. In space-tech speak, this is called direct-to-device: when consumers connect directly to satellites without extra hardware.
“The opportunity is phenomenal. We [would] move as a total industry from less than 10 million users of mobile satellite services to being able to reach billions of users,” the Abu Dhabi-based, Lebanese-Canadian executive told The National.
Unlike Space X's satellite internet service Starlink, Equatys is hoping for shared infrastructure to operate at a similar cost to phone providers. It will also be competing with Amazon’s Globalstar, acquired for $10.8 billion in April to compete with Starlink, and Elveo Mobile, a merger announced last month of Lynk Global and Omnispace that will deliver satellite to cell voice, text and data.
The competition is significant, but Equatys is coming to the market with a different model, said Anna Hazlett, founder of UAE-based space advisory firm AzurX.
"The advantage of shared infrastructure is that as more operators participate, the economics should improve, spreading the cost of the network, making better use of spectrum and improving performance," Ms Hazlett told The National.
"That could be a powerful differentiator at scale, particularly for operators and countries that want greater choice and control over critical communications infrastructure."
Transformative impact
The prime contractor for the Equatys satellites would be US company Viasat. Equatys would start with fewer than 200 satellites but the plan is to populate the project with 2,800 satellites on 60 orbital planes and three altitude layers.
On Monday, Viasat and Space42 announced they would commit $1 billion to Equatys. Viasat and Space42 want Equatys to start operating in 2029. “This is when Equatys will be able to bring the service into all the geographies that we want to serve,” Mr Sabbagh said.
“This is a market that has a value of anywhere between $30 billion and $70 billion in terms of recurring revenue per annum,” he added.
“It's is massively valuable to us, it's massively valuable to the mobile network operators, and it truly has a transformative impact on ultimately the economies and societies where we'll be able to deliver this particular service.”
chief executive of space services at Space42
Equatys will soon be incorporated as a company in a country that is yet to be disclosed, Viasat chief executive Mark Dankberg said. “The regulatory approvals we need are not spectrum approvals, licence to operate approvals, any of that stuff. It's really just the establishment of the entity itself,” he said. “There are potential antitrust issues that we have to deal with as well.”
Mr Sabbagh compared Equatys to undersea cables, which are operated by several operators across the globe. Another analogy is a communication tower similar to those seen on Earth, but in space with Equatys owning the network.
It's a novel idea that is both exciting and challenging, Mr Sabbagh said. “It's going to be very difficult to pull [off] because it has never been done before – two commercial operators operating [together], shared infrastructure in space. I've been in [the] space industry for almost two decades: never done this.”
At the same time, he senses strong interest. “I've been in two meetings this morning, where one continent and one large nation said: how can we be part of this?”
The hard part will be for Equatys to attract others, including satellites, so that the system grows, instead of every operator or nation building their own system.
“When you are deploying satellite systems that are covering Earth, and you are deploying these systems at a low orbit, the satellites are rotating much faster than Earth, which means that they are only covering your area of interest, your national territory, for a fraction of the time,” Mr Sabbagh said.
“For the rest of the time, they're flying over Earth. And if you're not using these satellites, that commercially you don't have an economically sustainable business model.”
Resilience
With Equatys, Space42 is supporting the UAE's ambitious and fast-developing space programme and helping consolidate its resilience to geopolitical shocks at a time when the Iran-US war has deeply disrupted critical infrastructure in the Arabian Gulf.
Space42 is listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and was created in 2024 through the merger of UAE based AI and geospatial firm Bayanat and Yahsat, the UAE's flagship satellite communications operator.
Now, Space42 operates the UAE's Foresight constellation that provides images to its AI-powered geospatial intelligence platform, GIQ, which processes the data to enable its use by governments, industries and other partners.
“While we design these at different times, the events that took place in 2025 and 2026 in the region proved that the work that we're doing were central to the functioning of the nation,” Mr Sabbagh said.
“They were essential services that supported the UAE government and also supported a number of large enterprises in the UAE that operated in critical infrastructure domains.”
The Equatys project is a “stepping stone” for the UAE to pioneer the direct-to-device market, Ali Al Hashemi, chief executive of space services at Space42 and former group chief executive at Yahsat, told The National.
“Nobody had a cookbook for how to do this before, and we are the first one who trying to fix this problem that telecom companies have to bring a system that will cover the underserved.”
A strong space infrastructure is key to consolidating a state's resilience, Mr Al Hashemi said, citing the UAE, which has been hit by Iranian drone and missile strikes since the US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran in February.
“All our system – [whether] it is Earth observation, if it is mobile satellite systems, if it is fixed satellite systems, if it is governmental, if it is even commercial systems, didn't go down. This is where the value of our services comes in,” Mr Al Hashemi said. “You can have a gazillion of data coming through a pipe but if it not resilient, it is a commodity. You only use it during times of peace.”
