CanarySat CEO Antonio Abad. Photo: CanarySat

CanarySat Satellite Services, the new Arquimea-backed satellite operator emerging from Spain’s Canary Islands, unveiled Magec, its advanced Ka-band, Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation last week during SATShow Week. Magec, a planned network of 264 satellites, is designed to provide sovereign, secure, and interoperable communications for governments, critical infrastructure operators, and essential enterprises.

Although CanarySat as a company is less than a year old, it inherits five years of design and constellation development work and more than 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) in MoUs from its parent group, says Antonio Abad, the newly appointed CEO.

Via Satellite spoke with Abad at SATShow about the origin of CanarySat, its Magec constellation architecture, and how the company plans to position itself in a rapidly evolving sovereign communications market.

VIA SATELLITE: Many of our readers are just hearing about CanarySat for the first time. How did the company come to be?

Abad: CanarySat was created by Arquimea, a Spanish technology company with over 20 years of experience in the space and defense sectors, more than 220 missions in space, a team of over 600 people, and revenues exceeding 100 million euros ($115 million). Arquimea has a strong track record in the design and development of satellite and launcher subsystems, including thermal systems, structures, avionics, and imaging and video systems, supporting a wide range of space missions. This expertise has laid the foundation for the development of our own constellation. We are not starting from scratch. We are building on five years of prior work to create our constellation. This is what makes us different: we are hitting the ground running as an established company.

VIA SATELLITE: You joined CanarySat as CEO in November. What did you bring to the role, and what changed when you came in?

Abad: I was hired to lead and increase the pace of this initiative. I’ve worked at Hispasat for 35 years, and the last 20 years I was the CTO, so I have certain experience and knowledge about the business.

VIA SATELLITE:  Why is moving at a faster pace so critical now?

Abad: There is a window of opportunity to respond to this growing recognition of the sovereignty of communications. During the pandemic, we concluded that communication was essential for living in a digital society and the foundation of this digital society is the communications capability. At that time, we didn’t care who provided the communication. We said, ‘Give me communication at the best price, and I will take it.’

In the last two years, we’ve seen a change in that perception. Suddenly, companies have started to care about who’s providing the communication. Is it secure? Do I control the communication and the routing of the communication? Is it a resilient system that can support failures and situations of crisis?

All this has become very important criteria, with a significant number of customers now concerned with sovereign communication.  It is an unsatisfied demand today in the market. We believe that there is a window of opportunity to [respond to] those demands, and that is something that we need to do in the short term because of the geopolitical situation and because of the needs of the different customers. What we are seeing is not a temporary shift, but a structural change. Control of communications is becoming a strategic capability.

VIA SATELLITE: Europe is pushing for greater strategic autonomy, particularly in communications. What role do you see CanarySat playing in strengthening European sovereignty?

Abad: We are a sovereign constellation, which means it is very well identified who we are, who our shareholders are, and where our industrial organization is based. There is a clear need in the market for this sovereign, secure communication. We want to be part of this market, but we also want to cooperate with all the other companies that will be developing this market as well.

VIA SATELLITE: A lot of today’s capacity is controlled by non-European players. How are your customers talking about that dependency?

Abad: In the last couple of years, customers now care who’s providing the communication. Two years ago, it was price. Now they say, ‘Who’s the owner of this company?’ ‘Where are they coming from?’ ‘Where is the technology of this system coming from?’ All those questions are now becoming relevant, and this is where we see this opportunity.

VIA SATELLITE: What led you to name your constellation, Magec?

Abad: There is a story behind the name. We are CanarySat and we have strong settlement in the Canary Islands. A teleport control center will be deployed in the Canary Islands. We have very significant support from the Canarian authorities and from the local authorities on the island of Tenerife. Because of that, we decided to use a Canarian-indigenous language name, Magec, which means ‘god of the sun.’ I love it because it sounds very international and we can play a little bit with the name. Our [marketing slogan] is: ‘It’s not magic, it’s technology. It’s Magec.’  At the same time, we are paying a bit of recognition to the local and native population of the island.

VIA SATELLITE: What is your deployment schedule for the constellation, and how are you funding it?

Abad: We’re targeting to deploy two demonstrators, a proof of concept, by 2028 — two satellites demonstrating the capabilities and the services that we can provide. And from there, we’ll move to the deployment of the constellation by 2030.

We need to meet this schedule. This is why we are a privately funded initiative. It doesn’t mean that we are not expecting public support — we still believe in the public/private partnership model and we expect to get commitments from anchor public customers. These commitments will allow us to raise the funding from private investors to deploy. We believe that the most efficient and fastest way to do this is with private funding.

VIA SATELLITE: How would you define Magec in terms of mission architecture and capabilities?

Abad: It’s a LEO constellation in Ka-band. It’s a transparent payload, which means that we are not processing the signal in the satellite. We are receiving the signal and, without altering it, sending it to the right destination.

Government customers want to use their own waveform, their own modulation techniques, their own coding techniques, and their own encryption techniques. We are not looking at what’s inside the signal; we’re just taking the signal and routing it in our network of satellites and downloading it to the customer’s location, without touching the integrity of the signal. Our customers have full flexibility to use their own encryption to send their message encrypted and closed.

VIA SATELLITE: Is this transparent-payload approach unique in the market today?

Abad: It’s not unique, but there is a bit of contradiction in the industry, because the technological trend is to open a signal and process what is inside. All this technology may be good for other kinds of applications, but when it comes to sovereign and governmental communications, we strongly believe that you must maintain the integrity of the signal. Our constellation — which is simpler and cheaper to deploy — does. And there is a third advantage: Magec allows for interoperability between systems. We are convinced that interoperability between different systems will be key in the future. It is not only a principle, but a core designed feature implemented at system level, from waveform transparency to ground orchestration.

VIA SATELLITE: You mentioned vendor lock-in as a problem in the past. How do you see interoperability changing the market?

Abad: We are coming from the days where, many years ago, vendor lock-in was the strategy for the satellite. We wanted to lock our customers to the vendor, and this is why we tried to use proprietary systems.

The mistake we made at that time is we were locking the customer, but we were preventing the business from growing because it was very expensive and very risky to buy a proprietary solution. What we’ve learned over these last 30 years: it pays the risk and the effort of doing an open and interoperable system, even having the risk that you can decide tomorrow to go with my competition. But this will drive the market to become bigger.

The question we need to ask is, ‘Do we want to have a small market where we have customers locked into our solution, or do we want to share and be interoperable and create a bigger market, to which we can have a bigger part of the system?’

VIA SATELLITE: Who are some of the key partners in your industrial ecosystem?

Abad: Our constellation is going to be built by Arquimea, because they’re our parent company, and we are making extensive use of Spanish industrial partners that are working with us. We are working with GMV. We are discussing and collaborating with Indra. We are also discussing with Telefónica. Several Spanish partners are helping us develop this solution.

VIA SATELLITE: You emphasized that CanarySat will offer strong service level agreements (SLAs). How do those differ from what’s typically available today?

Abad: In addition to the transparent payload and the interoperability, there are two main elements. The first one is that we are a sovereign constellation. The second is that we are committed to service level agreements (SLAs). While other constellations are best-effort based, we will offer committed SLAs, where we guarantee performance levels of our service.

Typically, other constellations state speeds of up to 100 megabits per second. There is  statistical multiplexing, and on average it will be 100 megabits per second. But at a point in time, it may be way less than that.

With Magec, if you want the 100 megabits per second and it is warranted, you will have exactly 100 megabits per second at any time. We are also committed to providing our customers with control over the routing of the communication.

VIA SATELLITE: How important is integrating the space and ground segments into a single sovereign architecture for you?

Abad: Today it’s not just the satellite that is providing the service; it’s a combination of the satellite and the ground infrastructure. The value is not in the satellite alone. It is in the system orchestration across space and ground. There is more and more intelligence on the ground infrastructure. It’s as important as the space segment to have good ground infrastructure that coordinates with the capacity that you have in orbit. For example, one of the services that we want to provide is multi-orbit services. That will be decided in a ground orchestrator that will check with your terminal. Taking the location of your terminal, it will advise your terminal whether it’s better to lock into a Geostationary Orbit (GEO) system or a LEO system, based on the situation of the terminal, the traffic of the overall network, and the performance requirements that you may need for this transmission.

VIA SATELLITE: Your teleport in the Canary Islands sits at a very strategic location between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. What advantages does that give you?

Abad: In our teleport in the Canary Islands, our local partner, Institute of Technology and Renewable Energies, is operating the cable network in West Africa. All the west coast of Africa, from Tangier to Cape Town, is covered with fiber, and that fiber is connected to our teleport. So if you are downloading your signal in our teleport, you can have access to all the western part of Africa indirectly.

This cable operator has three cables. There is one cable that is the one I mentioned on the west of Africa. There is another cable reaching up to the coast of Europe, up to the north of Spain. And there is a third cable, which is not yet deployed, that will be connecting with the South American continent. It will allow, if you are downloading, to connect either to Africa, to America, or to Europe, depending on where you are.

 VIA SATELLITE: How is CanarySat positioning itself relative to institutional initiatives like IRIS² and other national or regional programs?

Abad: We want our system to be complementary to IRIS² in two directions. We expect to complement IRIS² by supporting initial services ahead of its full deployment with our constellation. Additionally, we can be complementary, because we can complement the current services that are provided by IRIS² with our system, which is a bit more specific because of this transparent payload that I have explained.

There are initiatives in Germany and in Italy, and we are open to cooperating to make them interoperable. At the end of the day, the more we can interoperate the different systems, the better it will be for the end user and, at the end, also for the operators, because we’ll have a bigger, better market to provide.

VIA SATELLITE: Who are your target customers and mission profiles?

Abad: Typically, our customers will be public administration and governments, but we will also have critical infrastructure — energy, gas, power plants. We also will have essential enterprise communications. We believe that private companies are starting to value secure communications, and that is also a market that we want to address.

Companies spend a lot of money protecting the information that they are storing, but they are not always ready to pay for a secure connection. They have started to understand that, in the same manner that they’re spending money to protect the information they are storing, they also need to spend money protecting the information they’re sending. This is part of the services that we want to provide.

VIA SATELLITE: With Magec’s deployment plan beyond 2027, how do you see the satellite communications market evolving?

Abad: What I see is that the market will continue evolving with two different and separate systems. One will be commercial systems that will provide basic residential broadband services that will be based in best effort. They will be massive systems; they will go to very massive markets.

Then we will have these more sovereign, secure communications that will be focused, if I can call it that way, on premium customers that identify value over the communication capacity — they identify value in some other aspects like security, like resilience, like all these different features that for some specific customers are really providing some value.

VIA SATELLITE: You are flying a demonstration on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission. What can you tell us about that mission?

Abad: We launched a small demonstrator for some very innovative propulsion technology. If it works, it will help us build a more efficient constellation. We’ve seen it work very well on the ground. But when you’re talking about space technology, you’re not 100% sure until it has flown.

VIA SATELLITE: Finally, coming out of SATShow, what is the main message you want to convey about CanarySat?

Abad: The big message for me will be that we want to help. There is a clear need in the market for this sovereign, secure communication. We are not here to compete for capacity. We are here to build trusted communications infrastructure. We want to be part of this market, but we want to cooperate with all the other companies that will be developing this market. Also, the lesson we have learned in the last 30 years is that cooperation is the way to make a bigger market and to share a portion of a bigger cake, more than fighting for the small cake and getting a small piece.