New satellite direct-to-device company Elveo—formed after the recent merger of Lynk Global and Omnispace—is positioned to use technological architecture and spectral assets to provide connectivity in remote locations to public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities, according to an executive with the company.

Ram Viswanathan, Elveo’s chief strategy and corporate-development officer who previously served as president and CEO of Omnispace, said the recently completed merger deal will let assets from Lynk and Omnispace be leveraged in a manner that promises to deliver flexible, affordable connectivity to areas not covered by terrestrial networks.

“Our primary focus is on LEO [low-Earth-orbit satellites],” Viswanathan said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “What we’re doing is building a direct-to-device IoT network that is global in scope in LEO orbit.

“We’re really excited about the prospects of having combined the technological heritage and assets of Lynk … [which has] been a leader in the D2D space by way of the technology development, the patents that have been awarded, and the initial calls and messages that they did over the satellite—they were the first ones to do it. As for Omnispace, we came at it from the other direction. We really looked at from the point of view of spectrum, which we knew was going to be important to create these services and to take that technology and be able to deploy a network.”

Those spectrum assets include 60 MHz of licensed S-band airwaves, which means Elveo will have almost triple the amount of spectrum that most satellite-direct-to-device operators use to provide services today, Viswanathan said.

In addition, Elveo is partnered with SES, a satellite-connectivity company that is strategic investor and the operator of mid-Earth-orbit (MEO) and GEO constellations that Elveo plans to use in creating a multi-layered satellite solution, according to Viswanathan.

“We’re using that [MEO constellation from SES] selectively to relay traffic from the LEO layer to the MEO layer, and that gives us a number of advantages really for enterprise and government customers most of the time,” he said. “It provides us with enormous flexibility, Viswanathan said such “intersatellite relays across multiple orbits” are being tested on two satellites that were launched in May.

GEO satellites from SES also are expected to play key roles in the future Elveo network, supporting the monitoring of the LEO satellites and providing timing and positioning data, Viswanathan said.

In addition to leveraging multiple layers of satellite constellations, Elveo’s satellite direct-to-device offering is expected to include additional operational flexibility and resiliency. In addition to supporting “bent pipe” communications that require a working ground station, Elveo is being designed to support communications in locations where a ground station has been disabled or never existed—a feature that promises to be attractive to many first-responder agencies, Viswanathan said.

“One of the great salient and positive points about the architecture [is] we can work with governments, enterprises and public-safety agencies to be able to provide these services without relying on a ground infrastructure,” Viswanathan said. “Because you can imagine that either in an emergency situation or a disaster situation, you may not have that infrastructure operational in the area in which you want to deliver service.

“So, we have made sure that we have the capability to provide communications amongst users within a given satellite’s footprint—so it can go straight from one user to the satellite and back down to another user—or to be able to use the inter-satellite links to actually transmit traffic from that zone which has been affected out into the broader network. Both of those features are very relevant to government and enterprise—including public safety agencies—and we expect to be doing a lot of that with them.”

After the Lynk-Omnispace merger agreement was signed, the deal closed last month. Viswanathan said the U.S. government shutdown earlier this year resulted in the merger-approval process taking “a little longer than expected,” but he noted that “all’s well that ends well.”

This delay has impacted Elveo’s plan to launch an initial constellation of 320 LEO satellites to support global coverage with continuous satellite-direct-to-device (D2D) service, in which the satellites act as a roaming cellular tower in space, Viswanathan said. In about a year, Elveo plans to be able to launch as many as 20-25 satellites per launch, he said.

“The deployment plan will see initial batches of satellites being launched in late 2027—in the Q4 timeframe—and then substantially all of the constellation will be launched in the 2028 timeframe,” Viswanathan said. “We will be having D2D-type commercial services in the 2028 timeframe. Other commercial services that may not require full continuous coverage will be offered even earlier, as the earlier stages of the constellation go up.”

One potential example of a service that could be offered earlier than 2028 is in Canada, where Lynk signed an agreement with Rogers Communications in 2023that remains in place. Viswanathan said more than 50 other such deals that Lynk had with mobile carriers also still are active.

Viswanathan did not offer specifics about pricing for Elveo services but emphasized that company officials intend for its satellite-direct-to-device connectivity to be available at a “modest” cost.

“At the end of the day, the goal is to make this universally accessible,” Viswanathan said. “If you look at some of the other platforms that are out there, they’re expensive. If you look at it on a per-satellite basis, they are an order of magnitude more than ours. Consequently, when you translate that into the cost of the service, inherently, it’s going to be a very substantial premium to the cost of your terrestrial service.

“We believe—particularly because it’s a global constellation—we want to make it accessible not just in the U.S. and Europe, but also in developing markets throughout the world. We’ve got to make sure that we bring that economies of scale and the cost differential to the end customer, and that’s been a very big part of what we do.”