Could Europe’s four giant carriers’ new consortium rival Starlink?

The four potential collaborators initially formed an equal-partnership ad-tech joint venture in 2023.

Four of Europe’s largest telecom operators are said to be in talks to create a consortium that will bid on satellite spectrums and offer direct-to-mobile service in Europe, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.

The mooted partners – Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, France’s Orange, Spain’s Telefonica and the UK-headquartered Vodafone – are expected to make a joint bid for a share of airwaves that the EU has planned to reserve for local operators in order to strengthen home-grown European sovereign satellite communication capabilities, according to Bloomberg.

The sector is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The talks are in early stages, sources told Bloomberg. The four potential co-bidders initially formed an equal-partnership ad-tech joint venture in 2023.

Earlier this year, the EU adopted a proposal to select mobile satellite services providers who will be authorised to use the 2GHz frequency band beyond 2027, when the current licences expire. These licences were first handed out in 2008.

Under new rules, one-third of the band will be dedicated to government use, while the remaining two-thirds will be used commercially to provide direct-to-device services for mobile users.

SpaceX – which currently provides its satellite broadband to much of Europe with Starlink – has pushed back on the European Commission’s plans to boost satellite sovereignty in the region.

In June, the company said that the proposal creates a “significant likelihood that Europeans will be left without direct-to-device satellite services or that new European operations will create global interference problems, including to emergency services like those in Ukraine”.

SpaceX already has a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to provide direct-to-device services in the EU – something it cannot do independently.

Last year, Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile, a US company building a space-based cellular broadband network, announced a joint venture called SatCo with the aim of providing exclusive direct-to-device satellite broadband services to European mobile network operators.

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