Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
ESA pays neXat, Telesat and Colt 1.5 million euros to automate satellite backup for cable cuts
ESA has awarded neXat, Telesat and Colt 1.5 million euros to build a system that spots subsea cable cuts and moves traffic to satellite automatically. Shared APIs and pooled satellite suppliers would let carriers plan failover ahead of time, starting from a commercial launch targeted for 2028.
The Product Desk · Product desk
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What happened
- NeXat is prime contractor and supplies the platform, Telesat provides low-Earth orbit capacity as the first capacity provider, and Colt brings its IQ Network fiber.
- Backup capacity is meant to come from several satellite operators in a pooled mode, with neXat's OSS/BSS platform selecting and allocating it automatically.
- Commercial service is targeted for 2028, aligned with the Q1 2028 rollout of Telesat's Lightspeed service.
- The money comes from ESA's ARTES 4.0 program, through its Space Systems for Safety and Security (4S) program.
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Why it matters
- capability Agreed APIs and an ESA interface spec give carriers a fixed target to engineer against, so satellite failover can be written into network design before a cut happens.
- exposure Until another operator signs capacity into the pool, a carrier that relies on CableShield is relying on Telesat's LEO capacity alone.
- constraint A carrier budgeting resilience before 2028 still has to arrange backup some other way, and a slip in Lightspeed would stretch that gap.
An armored subsea cable that has been cut can take 10 to 20 days to repair, according to DCD's report on the award [12]. CableShield is built for those days. It is for the person running a carrier's network during the repair, who has to keep traffic moving until the cable comes back.
Caroline De Vos, neXat's chief operating officer, made the pitch. "Satellite provides the lifeline that keeps essential services online when their primary connectivity is gone," she said [4]. What ESA is paying for is a demonstration: 1.5 million euros for an 18-month program that runs from requirements to lab research and then to field trials [1][8]. That works out to about 83,000 euros a month [1].
For buyers, the design choice that matters most is the interface. The project ties three layers of infrastructure together through a common orchestration framework and agreed APIs [2]. Operators are authenticated under ESA's Pooling & Sharing Interface Definitions, so secure traffic is not exposed to unauthorized parties [11]. The fiber side of the demonstration has a large network to work with. Colt's IQ Network spans more than 1,100 connected data centers, ten subsea systems and 12 landing stations [7].
With a shared interface, the satellite supplier behind it can change without the carrier rebuilding its own side. De Vos said a dedicated multi-orbit platform like neXat's "ensures service providers can access and manage backup connectivity effectively when it is needed the most" [5]. The field trials will test whether it does. The report does not include switchover times, satellite capacity figures or pricing.
A carrier deciding whether to build its 2028 plans around this can sort the offer on two axes. The first is how many capacity providers are live behind the pool on the day the contract is signed: one, or several. The second is whether the carrier's own network triggers the reroute through the API, or a person still does. Several providers with an automatic trigger is the product neXat is describing. One provider with an automatic trigger is, in effect, a single-operator backup contract with good orchestration. With a manual trigger, in either column, the carrier is still running an emergency procedure, though the satellite capacity is easier to find. In the demonstration, the network side is Colt's fiber, served by its Traffic Engineering Agent [7].
What to watch
- Whether a second satellite operator commits capacity to the pool under ESA's PSID specifications before commercial launch.
- Whether carriers outside Colt's network connect their own traffic engineering to the orchestration APIs during the field trials.