Rivada expands to 18 markets
November 14, 2024
By Chris Forrester
Rivada Space Networks, despite not having a single satellite in orbit, says it has expanded its market access to 18 countries, and has added new spectrum to its portfolio.
Rivada says it has in the last year secured market access for its Outernet highly-secure constellation in 18 countries and on every continent. These countries include UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Colombia, Namibia, and more are in the pipeline. Rivada has also lined up more than $13.5 billion of business globally for its planned LEO network and has added 400 MHz of newly available spectrum to its portfolio.
“The ongoing success in obtaining the national rights to establish and operate a satellite network in low earth orbit using Ka band frequencies, provides trust for investors and prospective distributors that Rivada services can be used on board aircraft, vessels and on land,” it says.
Rivada, however, has some challenges ahead not least launching 300 satellites (288 plus 12 spares) into orbit by an obligatory September 2026 date and at a cost of $2.4 billion. The order to build the satellites was announced in February 2023 and at the time CEO Declan Ganley said it would begin deploying the fleet “as early as 2025”.
To date, Rivada has not been able to secure the necessary funding to build the fleet. On August 12th the fleet’s builder (Terran Orbital) removed the Rivada constellation from its list of backlog orders. Since then, Lockheed Martin has acquired Terran and – as yet – without any update on the position of the Rivada contract.
As to the additional bandwidth, Rivada says: “[We] have also secured expansion bandwidth in various bands for the Outernet network through an additional ITU filing, aptly called OUTERNET-1. This was notified through the Administration of Germany and leverages the recent WRC23 decisions to allocate an additional 400 MHz of spectrum of Ka band over the Americas, as well as new rules for NGSO mobility in Q and V band. With the rights to use the German OUTERNET-1 filing, Rivada will have a firm foot in the door to create options for future expansion.”
“Rivada’s dedicated team, led by Andrea Hols, spread over every region of the world, has embarked on a global outreach to regulators to introduce the Outernet and ensure that investors, distributors, and users have the legal certainty of clear spectrum rights. Market access processes vary from country to country and can take a very long time to negotiate,” says Ann Vandenbroucke, Rivada’s Chief Regulatory Officer. “We are therefore appreciative to those regulators that provide a first wave of official endorsement.”
Ganley added: “This marks another impressive milestone for Rivada, in which leading regulatory bodies around the world have approved the roll out of the Rivada Outernet for communications services. And as Germany’s newest LEO satellite operator, we are grateful for the support from the German authorities for this unique communications network. We are now on an exciting path to ensure that the Outernet is available for Europe and globally to solve essential secure connectivity and networking challenges and open up new business opportunities.”