Observing “significant global demand” for military Ka-band Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite capacity, Telesat is further optimizing its forthcoming Lightspeed LEO network for defense requirements by adding military Ka-band spectrum (Mil-Ka) to its initial 156 Lightspeed satellites.
“Specifically, we’re dedicating 500 MHz of our Lightspeed capacity to Mil-Ka, which is 25% of the total spectrum that Lightspeed will operate on,” Telesat president and CEO Dan Goldberg revealed during the firm’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings conference call.
“Because Mil-Ka spectrum is adjacent to the commercial Ka-band spectrum used by Lightspeed, the change in frequency plan is a straightforward one, resulting in no adverse schedule impact and only a modest cost impact.”
NATO and other Allied government interest
The driver behind this change, he explained, is that NATO members and other Allied governments are committing to meaningfully higher levels of defense spending in response to a range of geopolitical developments, and these allied defense users want Mil-Ka capability.
“[W]ith this change to Lightspeed, we’ll be able to offer a very substantial increase to the total current global supply of Mil-Ka with performance capabilities that are vastly superior to the Mil-Ka platforms that Allied governments have historically relied upon,” Goldberg said.
“Specifically, because we’re offering it from LEO on a highly flexible, highly advanced constellation, it will be more resilient, more secure, more high-throughput and lower latency, and it will cover the entire planet including the poles which means, of course, the Arctic.”
Notably, the spectrum used by Telesat for the Lightspeed gateway frequencies isn’t changing. And because Mil-Ka is adjacent to commercial Ka, the user terminal partners that Telesat has already been working with can easily accommodate the addition of the Mil-Ka.
While Telesat is fielding strong interest for Lightspeed, particularly in government and defense and is “very excited” about its Mil-Ka carve-out, it continues to face structural challenges for its geostationary (GEO) services, with ongoing revenue pressure in both its enterprise and broadcast segments.
The Canadian satellite operator posted a wider full-year 2025 net loss than in 2024, in part due to reduced revenue and higher non-cash impairment losses related to its GEO segment. GEO satellite usage was at 59% at the end of 2025.
A cost reduction scheme in the GEO segment did enable Telesat to exceed the Adjusted EBITDA guidance it gave at the outset of last year, however.
Slight slip to go-live date for global Lightspeed service
Telesat had hoped to launch Lightspeed globally by the end of 2027, and saw that timeline as achievable up until very recently. But it now expects the go-live date for offering global commercial Lightspeed service to slip by about three months to the first quarter of 2028.
“The cause of the slight slip is the readiness of the chips, the ASICs which power the onboard processor and phased array antennas of the Lightspeed satellites,” Goldberg explained on the call.
“These chips are being developed by SatixFy, which some of you may know was acquired by MDA last year. The delivery of these chips is one of the key schedule risks our program faced and for that reason, we were pleased that MDA acquired SatixFy, given that MDA has much greater financial and technical resources and is also our prime contractor for the Lightspeed satellites. We’re tracking the development of these chips pretty forensically. And based on that and the assurances we’re getting from MDA we feel good that the chips will be available in time to support the program schedule.”
Goldberg assured, however, that the initial Lightspeed satellite launch schedule remains intact. In December 2026, Telesat will launch two pathfinder satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, after which they will be extensively tested “before we start launching the rest of the satellites.”
The firm expects its “heavy launch schedule” for Lightspeed satellites to occur roughly “mid-next year,” which should ensure it has at least 96 satellites in orbit by the end of 2027 to support global coverage in 1Q 2028. The new three-month schedule cushion also considers the time it will take to orbit-raise and test the satellites, Goldberg said.
Amara in 2028?
The inflight connectivity market has long looked forward to Lightspeed’s entry, as Telesat has taken a B2B approach to the market and the LEO-powered IFC will be delivered with guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs).
Satellite operator and aero ISP Viasat already has a substantial multi-year agreement with Telesat to use Lightspeed for a range of services, including to support its new GEO/LEO multi-orbit broadband IFC service for commercial airlines. Under Telesat’s new timeline, Viasat will ostensibly be able to support this Amara-branded IFC service in 2028.
“Airlines and business jet users around the world are showing a strong appetite for high-throughput, low-latency satellite connectivity and Lightspeed has been optimized to serve their fast-growing requirements,” Goldberg said on the call, highlighting the Viasat agreement.
“But without a doubt,” he stressed, “some of the most compelling near-term opportunities we’re pursuing are in the government defense market.”
To that end, he said, the Government of Canada in its recently released Defense Industrial Strategy “identified satellite communications as a critical sovereign capability, pledging in the first instance to procure these important services from Canadian companies like Telesat in order to meet its and Canada’s allies sovereignty and security requirements with the Arctic.”
“And Canada certainly isn’t alone in identifying the need for advanced LEO services for defense and sovereignty purposes. The U.S. the EU, Germany, Italy, South Korea are just a few of the governments that have plans to procure such capabilities,” said the Telesat CEO, noting, for instance, that the firm’s U.S. subsidiary, Telesat Government Solutions, was awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract under the US$151 billion Missile Defense Agency’s Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program, making it an approved supplier for the Golden Dome project.
He also pointed to a recently signed MOU with Hanwha Systems to work together on leveraging Lightspeed and Hanwha Defense offerings, as well as to the December 2025 announcement that the Government of Canada has tapped MDA and Telesat to develop and deliver a multi-frequency, Arctic military satellite communications (MILSATCOM) capability to the Canadian Armed Forces.
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Featured image credited to Stefonlinton
