The Canadian company Telesat is shifting from a GEO SATCOM provider to LEO, which will increase its SATCOM (Lightspeed) speeds and bring it into direct competition with other pLEO SATCOM providers such as Iridium, OneWeb, and Starlink. To support their business operations and expected growth, they are partnering with South Korea’s Intellian to develop ground station antennas at 20-30 sites across the Globe. This decision is suspected to be driven by observing OneWeb’s delays in implementation due to its decision to develop antennas in-house; however, this may introduce additional risks.

Developing the antennas by a second company introduces cybersecurity risks in deploying and manufacturing the ground architecture. State or non-state actors could target these partnerships to erode industry trust or implant backdoors on any operating system or health monitoring software. Additionally, Telesat is on contract to launch via Space-X, which owns Starlink (a competitor), and could itself become a target of CNE/CNA to delay launches or cause catastrophic failures resulting in a loss of trust and revenue for the company. These risks must be carefully mitigated through Telesat’s partnerships in the space industry.

Article: Telesat contracts Intellian for Lightspeed LEO gateways – SpaceNews