Backhaul from orbit

No American filer treats satellite backhaul as material

The first measure of a business is what its participants tell their shareholders, and on satellite backhaul they say nothing. It is too small for any American filer, on either side of the contract, to describe in a filing (Exhibit 1).

Among the buyers, the FY2025 Forms 10-K of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, filed in February 2026, do not refer to satellite backhaul. None of the three names OneWeb, Amazon Leo, Starlink or SpaceX. Verizon comes closest, with one sentence about “partnering with satellite providers to enhance off-grid emergency and text messaging services”, which is direct-to-device, a different product. Where Verizon otherwise mentions satellite companies it is as competitors. T-Mobile mentions backhaul, but every reference is to a terrestrial contract.

The sellers say little more. SpaceX’s prospectus lists telecom among the industries its enterprise business serves and describes Starlink Fixed Site as “primary or backup connectivity for distributed business locations globally”, including sites “that are difficult to serve economically with fiber”, a fair description of a cell site on a hillside. There is no mobile-operator line in the accounts. Enterprise & Government revenue was $1,806 million in the second quarter of 2026, more than double the $867 million a year earlier, but the same figure holds aviation, maritime, government and Starlink Mobile. Eutelsat’s fixed connectivity revenue of €270 million in the year to 30 June 2026 grew 15.6% like for like, a rise it attributes mainly to low-orbit solutions, and it gives no backhaul figure. Viasat and EchoStar quantify none in their quarterly filings to 30 June 2026 either.

Carriers buy satellite backhaul for reach and resilience

What is public comes in three weights. The heaviest is a carrier’s own product page, then a satellite operator’s release or page, then a trade report that names both parties, and each arrangement carries its own tag (Exhibit 2).

Every row in that table is a claim by a party with an interest in it, and only FirstNet’s says what a satellite link supports in a live network product. Its Mobile Connectivity Hub, Compact Rapid Deployable and miniCRD “can support up to 64 simultaneous LTE users, using a typical Starlink satellite connection”. On “high-speed ethernet or fiber” the Hub supports “up to 600 simultaneous FirstNet users”. On the one product that publishes the comparison, then, a satellite link serves about a ninth of the users a fibre link does (Exhibit 3). The ratio comes from one product on one link, but it is the only measured figure in public.

The other rows give throughput rather than users, which makes them harder to compare. Claro Brasil takes 4 Gbps over O3b mPOWER to extend mobile backhaul to at least eight cities in the Amazon region. Hughes sells geostationary backhaul to operators it does not name, at “200 Mbps+ throughput per terminal” across hundreds of sites. The five rows show carriers buying satellite backhaul where the alternative is no site at all, or as the second path for when the first is cut.

The orbit sets a floor under every packet the site handles

Backhaul adds a round trip of its own to everything a cell site carries. A satellite in that path adds four propagation legs, two up and two down, before the network has added anything of its own (Exhibit 4).

How long those legs take depends only on the altitude, and part 1 gives the floors from overhead to 10° elevation. Low orbit at 480 km adds 6.4 to 22.0 ms, and O3b mPOWER 107.6 to 158.7 ms. A geostationary satellite adds 477.5 to 541.5 ms, the better part of half a second before a single router has touched the packet. The figures the operators publish land just above those floors, as they should (Exhibit 5). SpaceX gives a Starlink median of about 25 ms. SES offers “150 milliseconds of predictable satellite latency”. Hughes describes its geostationary backhaul as “600 millisecond latency, 10-millisecond jitter”, and says its LTE optimisation saves “up to 60% of satellite bandwidth”.

Half a second does not disqualify every service. Hughes sells geostationary backhaul for 2G to 5G sites, so voice and messaging run across that delay in live networks today. Anything interactive suffers, as does every protocol that waits on a handshake, because each exchange pays the half second again. Capacity runs in the same order as delay, orbit by orbit, and the operators put it as follows.

• O3b mPOWER. SES describes the system as delivering “multiple gigabits per second”, and Claro’s 4 Gbps bears that out.
• Amazon Leo. Amazon describes a Leo Ultra terminal at up to 1 Gbps down and 400 Mbps up.
• Hughes JUPITER. Hughes sells 200 Mbps and more per geostationary terminal.
• Starlink V3. SpaceX says its V3 satellites are “designed to offer one Tbps of downlink capacity per satellite” and are due to start deploying on Starship in the second half of 2026, a design figure rather than a measured one.

One more sign that SpaceX sees backhaul as a market: in DA 26-36 the FCC authorised W-band uplinks to Starlink satellites, on an unprotected and non-interference basis, which SpaceX had asked for “particularly for backhaul use cases”.

Disaster fleets are the one visible carrier use

Satellite backhaul is most visible in an American network after a disaster. SpaceX’s prospectus says that during Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 its terminals “provided a rapid lifeline for communication and recovery” when cell towers, broadband lines and power were out “for days or weeks”. SpaceX deployed over 650 terminals after the 2023 Maui wildfires. The cell sites go uncounted: neither the prospectus nor any carrier filing says how many were restored over satellite after those storms, and Verizon’s and T-Mobile’s 10-Ks do not name a satellite supplier for their disaster fleets.

A terminal on a tower needs a licence per site until Part 100 takes effect

One piece of paperwork scales badly. Under Part 25 of the FCC’s rules an earth station is licensed site by site. Blanket licences exist only in listed bands, for geostationary and non-geostationary fixed-satellite service, as the Commission’s own 2025 proposal describes. For a carrier putting terminals on hundreds of towers that is a cost and a delay per site. Part 100, adopted in FCC 26-47 on 22 July 2026, adds a “Nationwide, Non-Site license” under which individual sites are registered over time. An operator with a current, approved Form 312 that asks for a licence without waivers may “begin operating on a non-interference, unprotected basis once the application is placed on public notice” (Exhibit 6).

Part 100 is adopted but not yet in force. The FCC’s own fee order of 14 September 2026 still refers to it as rules that have yet to “become effective and replace the existing rules” in Part 25. Part 5 sets out the rest of what the new rules do.

Five checks before a carrier signs

1. Measure the round trip against the floor. The orbit sets the floor and the network adds the rest, and a geostationary hop starts at 478 ms before anything else. Ask the supplier for its measured median and read it against the floors in part 1.
2. Contract for users or throughput per site. The only published comparison is FirstNet’s, 64 LTE users on a typical Starlink link against 600 on fibre, and it was published by the buyer. Write the service level you need into the contract, because the terminal’s peak rate is a different number.
3. Test the supplier’s milestones and solvency. Hughes Satellite Systems and subsidiaries including Hughes Network Systems filed for Chapter 11 on 2 August 2026, and say they expect to keep operating. Amazon Leo had 392 of the 1,616 satellites due at its milestone, and Lightspeed’s global service is due around the end of the first quarter of 2028. All of it is in SEC filings and FCC orders.
4. Map the licensing path for every site. Today that is site by site under Part 25; once Part 100 takes effect it is one nationwide non-site licence. Watch FCC 26-47 for its effective date.
5. Design in a second orbit or a second supplier. FirstNet names five satellite providers for its deployables, “and more”, which is how a careful buyer behaves.

Judgement The checks are Blue Prysm’s; the evidence for each is cited above and in parts 1 and 5: EchoStar Form 8-K, Item 1.03, filed 3 Aug 2026 · DA 26-553 and CelesTrak, 7 Oct 2026 · Telesat 6-K, 13 Aug 2026 · FCC 26-47 · FirstNet pages

Terms used

• Backhaul. The link from a cell site back to the operator’s core network, usually fibre or microwave. Satellite backhaul replaces it with a terminal at the site and a gateway somewhere on the ground.
• Deployables. Cell sites on vehicles, trailers, cases or tethered drones, moved into an area after a disaster. Each needs backhaul wherever it happens to be parked, and satellite is the one link that can be counted on to be there.
• Earth station. The FCC’s term for any ground terminal that talks to a satellite, from a gateway dish to a terminal on a tower. Earth stations in motion, on ships, aircraft and vehicles, are licensed under rules of their own.