Telesat signed a global framework agreement with SatPort Infrastructure, the companies said Tuesday, that lets the Ottawa satellite operator commission landing stations for its Lightspeed broadband network anywhere in the world.
The agreement is a Master Services Agreement — described in the release as a framework letting SatPort build individual landing stations as Telesat needs them, rather than a one-off contract for a single site. SatPort will build and host the physical sites to Telesat’s design; Telesat keeps ownership and control of the network equipment that runs on them.
Telesat has so far built Lightspeed’s ground network piecemeal: buying land itself in Timmins, Quebec and Saskatchewan, and signing separate country-by-country deals with Orange in France and Vocus in Australia. Tuesday’s agreement gives it one standing framework to draw on instead, turning ground-segment capital spending into an ongoing service fee.
SatPort describes itself as a carrier-neutral ground-infrastructure platform backed by the investment firm EQT. EQT originally built SatPort to take over Eutelsat’s own established ground-station network, a deal that collapsed in January after France’s government blocked it on national-security grounds.
“A globally distributed landing station network is essential to delivering the low-latency, secure connectivity our enterprise and government customers expect from Telesat Lightspeed,” said Asit Tandon, Telesat’s chief network and information officer, in the release.
The release doesn’t disclose a contract value or a timeline for the first site.