Capability C04
Commercial satellite broadband
Consumer and business satellite internet access.
⚑ Draft assessment — requires reviewConfidence: Low
Recommended approach
Buy
Last reviewed 9 Nov 2026
Rationale (analytical judgement)
Buy for non-critical use, while keeping governmental use on secure systems (see Secure governmental communications). Pressure risk is high, so the Buy recommendation needs review.
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Three main questions
- How critical?
- Medium — Important for connectivity and resilience, but not a sovereign function in itself.
- Pressure risk
- High — could an external provider use the dependency as political or economic pressure?
- Alternative in 24 months?
- Partially
Current position
- European capability
- European commercial capacity exists, but the largest LEO broadband constellations are non-European (scale not yet sourced).
- External dependencies
- Users may depend on non-European constellations; risk rises if such services are used for critical or governmental functions.
- Main external actors
- SpaceX (Starlink) — market position to be sourced
Additional factors
Factors without a recorded assessment are shown as not yet assessed.
- Cost of developing European capacity
- Not yet assessed
- Time to operational readiness
- Not yet assessed
- Availability of trusted partners
- Not yet assessed
- Market concentration
- Likely concentrated; requires sourcing.
- Technological maturity
- Not yet assessed
- Impact on innovation and competitiveness
- Buying preserves access to commercial innovation.
- Security and resilience
- Not yet assessed
Recommendation history
Manual adjustments with their documented explanation.
No adjustments yet
The draft recommendation has not been changed.
Relevant KPIs
No kpis linked
No relationship recorded.
Related risks
- R5 US dependency
Commercial broadband is dominated by non-European providers.
⚑ Suggested link — not validated