For more than four decades, Inmarsat has led the way as an innovator and investor in space technology.
We have built the world’s most reliable satellite networks and deliver an unrivalled portfolio of solutions to keep people and things connected on land, at sea and in the air – every minute of every day.
But we do not stand still. To ensure our global mobility, government and IoT customers always get the connection they need, whenever, wherever and however, we have a fully funded technology roadmap that charts our long-term plan to stay ahead of the ever-increasing demand for seamless, global mobile connectivity.
The roadmap gives our customers confidence that Inmarsat will always be there – both to help them solve their toughest connectivity challenges today and to give them the edge in addressing emerging opportunities tomorrow.
From our original and continuing core mission to protect lives at sea, we have always provided service to the most remote locations on the planet. We fly our satellites in geostationary orbit, 35,786km (22,236 miles) above the Earth, and it only takes three satellites to cover the globe and meet the needs of our global mobility customers.
Our strategy has always been to deliver global coverage first, then increase capacity as demand builds. We want our networks to be the most reliable, so we build redundancy into our infrastructure in space and on the ground.
Today we own and operate 15 geostationary satellites powering seamless safety and mission-critical mobile broadband communications around the world. And to meet ever more complex bandwidth demands in the future, we will launch a further eight satellites by 2026 and significantly expand our ground network to support them.
We are always looking to the future and for ways to add to our long track record of successful, customer-centric innovation. This has led us to create multi-dimensional solutions as part of our global coverage services. Like the European Aviation Network, which combines an S-band satellite with ground-based LTE in a hybrid air-to-ground network. And Fleet Xpress, which provides a dual-band service by bringing together both Ka-band (Global Xpress) and L-band (ELERA) in a single product.
And with Inmarsat ORCHESTRA we are delivering the ultimate in intelligent orchestration. ORCHESTRA is a unique, multi-dimensional network that brings together all our satellites and services into one seamless solution to deliver connectivity with certainty – from busy ports to the open seas, across remote landscapes and busy flight routes.
ORCHESTRA will integrate our existing Global Xpress and ELERA satellite networks in geostationary orbit with two new Global Xpress satellite payloads in highly elliptical orbit, a small, targeted number of low Earth orbit satellites, and dynamic terrestrial 5G mesh technologies. The result - a single advanced solution for global mobility.
ORCHESTRA is a natural progression of our technology roadmap. By leveraging our existing market-leading assets, and adding new technologies, it creates unprecedented new services to support our on-going strategic focus on global mobility customers.
Global Xpress, the world’s first global, mobile high-speed broadband network, is the service of choice for governments, shipping companies and airlines around the world. Currently served by a fleet of six satellites, we have an additional six satellites scheduled to launch or come into service by 2025.
GX6A launched in 2021 and is Inmarsat’s largest and most advanced satellite ever built. Delivering twice the capacity of our entire existing GX fleet, it features 20 Ka-spot beams that can be directed to meet customer demand second-by-second, and will power greater capacity, coverage and speeds for our customers into the 2040s and beyond. GX6A came into service in 2023 over the Indian Ocean.
GX7, 8 & 9, scheduled to launch by 2025, will employ dynamic beam forming to simultaneously create thousands of independent beams of different sizes, bandwidth and power that can be reconfigured and repositioned across the globe in real time.
Two HEO (highly elliptical orbit) payloads, GX10A & 10B will become the world’s first and only mobile broadband payloads dedicated to the Arctic region, through a partnership with Space Norway and its subsidiary Space Norway HEOSAT. The satellite carrying our payloads is currently scheduled to launch in 2024.
We launched the world’s first global 3G mobile satellite network in 2008, powered by our Inmarsat-4 L-band fleet. Now, as we enter the 5G era, we are continuing to invest in our ELERA global narrowband network to deliver new innovations in global, mobile satellite communications and transform the capabilities offered to Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility customers for years to come.
The Inmarsat-6 fleet of satellites – I-6 F1 and I-6 F2 – will support a new generation of advanced applications and enhanced global safety services into the 2040s and beyond.
And three I-8 satellites, just 1.5 cubic metres in volume, will launch by 2026 to secure the future of our global L-band maritime and aviation critical safety services and support advances in emergency tracking.
Built by SWISSto12, the I-8s are an innovative new form of spacecraft that are five times smaller than traditional GEO satellites and will feature radionavigation transponders to enable Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) services for Governments and international space agencies.
Complementing our growing fleet in space is an even bigger expansion on Earth. Investment in our ground network of satellite access stations (SAS) saw six new traffic gateways commissioned in 2020 to support GX5.
Strategically located across Europe, these diverse sites will support the high capacity of GX5 while providing the high assurance synonymous with Inmarsat. By 2022, another eight sites were commissioned to support further regional connectivity expansion and the new Inmarsat-6 satellites.
As our ground network becomes ever more software-driven with cloud-hosted processing capabilities, it is becoming more efficient and agile even as we massively increase capacity.
A new generation of satellite terminals will further enhance the unique qualities of each service. With Global Xpress that means supporting much higher sustained rates when used on GX5 and future satellites while BGAN network terminals will be smaller, lighter and more cost effective in delivering essential low-to-medium data rate services with high reliability.
Terminals already in use will work better too, thanks to the capacity we are adding to high traffic regions where congestion is most likely.
