For decades, the satellite business ran on one assumption: if you want capacity, you build and own the hardware. Two operators have now set up a company whose entire point is that nobody should have to. The result is Equatys, a neutral-host network where carriers rent the sky instead of buying it.
Plans call for up to 2,800 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites across 60 orbital planes, seeded by Space42's $600 million of early capital.
The first satellite-bus order is the next milestone, likely before end-2026, with commercial 3GPP-aligned service targeted before the decade closes.
Direct-to-device (D2D) is the fastest-growing layer of satellite comms. This is the sector betting it becomes a utility, not a product line.
The venture was announced in September 2025, with commercial rollout planned within three years. In August this year the JV moved into its initial constellation procurement phase, the point where paper intentions convert into multimillion-dollar contracts.
TIMELINE: Equatys, the space tower company
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
2025-09 ──── 2025-10 ──── 2026-03 ──── 2026-08 ──── 🔥 NEXT
🚀 JV 📱 e& 🛰 2,800 📝 Procure 🏗 Bus order
announced MoU signed sats named phase opens + first launch
Chronology per SatNews procurement update (Aug 2026) and SpaceNews coverage.
Equatys constellation size, users-agnostic
2,800 satellites in 60 orbital planes across three altitude layers, designed so capacity can be added without redesign.
Two operators, one constellation
The parents are not small players. Viasat is one of the larger geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) operators globally, with a legacy in aeronautical and government connectivity. Space42 is Abu Dhabi's AI-powered space firm, created in 2024 from the combination of the Bayanat and Yahsat businesses, and listed on the Abu Dhabi exchange.
The two contributed their existing Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) spectrum: more than 100 megahertz of harmonized L-band and S-band frequencies already licensed across over 160 markets. That scale is the asset. "World's largest coordinated block of D2D frequencies" is marketing language, but the underlying claim is measurable: no single D2D rival today holds a comparable footprint of already-allocated spectrum.
The technical bet is that a satellite network can behave like a terrestrial one. By aligning with 3GPP Release 17 and Release 18, the standards body's rules for non-terrestrial networks, the joint venture aims to connect unmodified 5G smartphones, cellular IoT hardware, and automotive telematics directly from orbit. No special antenna, no extra chip in the phone.
The tower-company math
The model borrows from the cellular tower industry, a sector that spent two decades working out how to make shared infrastructure profitable. A tower company builds the mast, rents space to competing operators, and never cares which of them gains the subscriber. The venture is that structure translated to orbit: it is the neutral host, and the mobile network operators (MNOs) are its tenants.
The economics are simple in concept and brutal in practice. A single operator building its own D2D constellation absorbs billions in launch and manufacturing cost before the first subscriber connects. Renting capacity from the venture costs a fraction of that upfront, and lets the tenant keep its customers, its brand, and its billing relationship.
As we wrote in August with the AST SpaceMobile BlueBird network, the D2D market is moving from demonstrations to deployment. What the joint venture adds is a structural twist: it wants to be the landlord of the whole layer, not another fighter in the coverage war.
Capital efficiency: tenants buy capacity, not hardware.
Sovereignty: national spectrum allocations stay with each market's regulators, which matters to governments wary of foreign-controlled constellations.
Density: one shared constellation across many operators is cheaper per subscriber than many parallel ones.
What the procurement actually buys
The August 6 milestone is small on the surface. It is a shift from engineering planning into vendor selection. Its weight is in the contracts behind it. The venture is finalizing choices for satellite buses, transparent payloads, phased array antennas, and ground stations. Rocket Lab has emerged as the leading candidate for the bus manufacturing contract, betting on its expanding spacecraft production lines.
Space42 committed $600 million of initial capital expenditure to seed the build-out across 2026–2027. That figure funds design and manufacturing ramp, not the full constellation. The model is designed so subsequent tranches open as commercial anchor tenants sign.
Voice, messaging, and narrowband data come first; the architecture allows satellites to be added as demand grows without redesigning the system.
Turning points
Three moments decide whether the venture becomes the sector's landlord or its cautionary tale.
First, the bus contract. A prime manufacturer at the right price de-risks the whole plan; a cost overrun here propagates through every downstream tranche.
Second, anchor tenants. Viasat and Space42 have committed to being the two largest initial users, and e& of the UAE signed an early memorandum of understanding in October 2025. The model depends on more MNOs arriving quickly enough to justify each new launch batch.
Third, timing against the competition. SpaceX's roughly $17 billion EchoStar spectrum deal gave its D2D plans direct ownership of globally cleared S-band frequencies, and AST SpaceMobile claims over 50 mobile partnerships worldwide. The venture must convert procurement into commercial service before the market's default connectivity standard is set by someone else.
Where the money actually sits
The investment picture is a testable tension rather than a certainty. On one side, the shared-infrastructure logic is powerful: the tower model already proved that the most profitable position in a connectivity boom is often below the operators, not among them.
On the other side, execution risk is concentrated. A neutral host only works while its tenants believe the network will exist. Tenants commit capital only when the host shows hardware. Both sides of that loop are unproven at this scale, and no satellite tower company has ever been erected at 2,800 satellites.
The named prime-bus award and its unit economics: cost per satellite, not press-release headline.
Number of MNO tenants at first commercial launch, and whether any non-MSS operator joins the anchor pair.
Whether Spectrum-derived revenue is booked as infrastructure (lease) or service revenue in Viasat's results.
Comparative capex-per-subscriber versus SpaceX's D2D and AST SpaceMobile deployments.
"What we're focused on is the details of a satellite constellation procurement for Equatys and then what that means for each of the users of the Equatys constellation, with us and Space42 being the two largest and initial users of it. In terms of the amount of increase in capacity, that's going to be orders of magnitude."— Mark Dankberg, Chairman and CEO, Viasat
The tower company is rarely the most interesting company in a telecom boom. It is usually the most durable one. The venture is trying to find out whether that rule survives gravity.
