Michaël Trabbia, CEO of Orange Wholesale

Orange is taking another step forward in the direct-to-device (D2D) arena with partnership deals signed with AST SpaceMobile and Satellite Connect Europe, a European joint venture between AST SpaceMobile and Vodafone that will see it look to launch D2D services based on mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum in relevant Orange markets. It is a non-exclusive deal with AST SpaceMobile and could see Orange do further deals in this area.

Michaël Trabbia, CEO of Orange Wholesale said during a small press gathering prior to Mobile World Congress (MWC) that the company will conduct D2D satellite connectivity demonstrations in Romania focusing on voice, SMS, and data in the second half of 2026 before a more comprehensive service launch. In addition, the collaboration includes exploring specific measures to support European security requirements and studying the integration into a core network managed by Orange.

Trabbia outlined the important elements of this deal. “The first one is obviously the quality of service, the level of service that we can offer to our customers,” he said. “We want to ensure that we have the best solution for our customers, and it’s fair to say that the AST technology answers that part. We are confident on their technology, the roadmap to launch satellites is credible from our perspective.”

Orange already had a commercial D2D debut in France with the launch of the ‘Message Satellite’ service in December 2025, working with Skylo. Orange claims this is a first in Europe for a telecom operator, and this service is available today using GEO satellites. However, the service is limited to just messaging.

While Trabbia didn’t want to give a specific date on the new service launch, he gave some insight into the timeline.

“Our ambition ultimately is to use mostly MSS spectrum. We know that in Europe, this allocation will take time/place between 2027 and 2028. So, that’s an indication [of when we might be able to launch a service],” he said. “Having said that, we could launch commercial service using our own spectrum, depending on the countries. This will be a country-dependent analysis. It’s not something to launch necessarily on a European basis, for instance.”

Trabbia said this decision would be made based on the availability of those frequencies. “This is not something that we have decided yet. Every commercialization will have a specific contract related to it. Those are not signed and are not yet decided.”

In terms of Orange’s overall strategy, Trabbia said satellite is important for the telco. The company’s recently unveiled strategic plan for the future articulated the telco needs to have complementary services such as satellite alongside its more traditional services, even if it has very good terrestrial coverage.

“When we conduct surveys with our customers, there is an appetite from customers to benefit from these services — even if it is rarely used and sometimes they don’t use it at all,” said Trabbia. “This is an important element for them, and we are willing to leverage all the technologies and satellite brings another dimension and connectivity that we are willing to use to benefit our customers.”

The deal with AST SpaceMobile is a multi-layered one. It has essentially signed two MoUs with the company, one as JV to cover Europe, and another one for the rest of the world. The technical trial that Orange will do will be the same no matter where it might offer services.

“The technical trial is the same for everybody. We can test it once. And that’s very relevant for multiple countries, even if there are some unique characteristics, including the location of the ground station, the gateways, etc. This is something we are looking at. Orange is an important partner for satellite players. We provide ground stations for many of them,” Trabbia said in terms of the technical trials.

Orange will work with AST SpaceMobile on some key elements that the telco thinks may be important to guarantee the service. Trabbia says, “The first one is the control switch, which is the ability to make sure that a European company is able to control the satellite while they are over Europe and providing service to European customers. We want to make sure that the gateways are in Europe, so the data of the European customers stay in Europe. We want to make sure that we control the traffic of our customers.”

One of the key aspects of this deal will be gaining access to MSS spectrum in order to implement these services. Orange itself won’t be applying for the spectrum, but will be supporting AST’s potential application for this spectrum. However, Trabbia would like to see a number of players in this market.

“As far as Orange is concerned, first our ambition is really to have a diversity of players. We have this partnership with AST, but we are not shareholder of AST, and it’s important for us that there is a diversity of players in satellite,” he said.

Expanding on this point, Orange thinks these services are important for its customers, but it doesn’t necessarily want to have exclusivity. Trabbia says the telco believes there will be very few satellite constellations available, and it doesn’t want to prevent peers or competitors to have to access them. “Vodafone is a shareholder of AST, and so you see in that agreement that they are not preventing us to partner with AST. This is not necessarily something we should be differentiating on, but we should be definitely offering that, and being one of the first players to offer that complementarity to our customers,” he said.