The mobile phone has been one of the most successful technology products of all time and a large proportion of this has been down to the development and adoption of standards. The success of the 3GPP family of technologies has delivered a global market with broad innovation, but also a choice of suppliers, economies of scale and guaranteed interoperability. The shift from proprietary cellular phone technologies to UMTS open standards is recognised as the inflection point which began this revolution, and as the industry extends into non-terrestrial networks (NTN) this approach again has a significant role to play.
The last few months have seen the development of the 5G space movement accelerate with major announcements on a seemingly weekly basis. Many of these are putting in place the building blocks to bring together terrestrial and non-terrestrial 5G networks.
The state of play today
Recently industry trade association the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) issued research showing that, by the end of August 2025, there were 170 publicly announced operator-satellite partnerships in 80 countries and territories – with 34 operators in 25 markets having launched commercial services. Of this number, Starlink leads the provider landscape with 44 partnerships, followed by AST SpaceMobile and Lynk.
While the majority of satellite systems currently in use globally are based on proprietary technology, it’s clear that the shift to standards is coming as these two industries converge in earnest. While the proprietary approach offers advantages in terms of speed to market and is particularly useful in early technology markets like today’s satellites, the reality is that it simply doesn’t scale or provide the foundation for global success.
Whilst 3GPP is responsible for evolving the core technical standards that are driving this movement of 5G to space, multiple other bodies are working to standardise solutions to a wide range of associated challenges.
3GPP focuses on the underlying challenges of providing service from space and allows devices from any manufacturer to communicate with networks built by any operator. The standards address issues such as high pathloss over links, creating a coverage and throughput challenge, and the very large beam or “cell” footprints creating a capacity issue. They are also travelling at extremely high speeds which leads to Doppler synchronisation problems and issues managing complex handovers as the satellites in view to user equipment is constantly changing.
Other bodies such as the SCF (Small Cell Forum), Open RAN Alliance and Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA) are working to define standard solutions to the multiple challenges of building and operating a network in the challenging environment of a satellite payload. Topics such as adapting terrestrial standards like the SCF FAPI interface for use within a satellite payload allow satellite operators to build their constellation with a consortium of partners, whilst reducing the risks and timescale required for integration.
At AccelerComm we are active participants in a whole range of industry associations, developing standards and approaches from across the cellular and satellite industries. This includes working with the SCF (Small Cell Forum), Open RAN Alliance, Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA), Mobile Satellite Users Association (MSUA) and 3GPP itself.
The foundations of the mass market
3GPP has taken a phased approach to addressing challenges and delivering standards and architectural approaches that can build on existing terrestrial models but that are also fit for purpose in the space environment. It has defined a clear roadmap for delivering 5G NTN, with the 2021 release of 3GPP Release 17 providing a baseline that addresses the key challenges of providing coverage from orbit, using 3GPP waveforms to deliver significant improvements over non-standardised NTN. Release 18 allows the network to be upgraded to provide further improvements in coverage and throughput. Upgrades in Release 19, the latest iteration of the standard, will unlock the full power of NTN, bringing additional enhancements to coverage and capacity, a seamless user experience which will unlock new use cases and revenue streams for mobile operators.
Handsets supporting 3GPP Release 17 started to ship in 2022 and now feature smartphones from all of the major vendors including Google, Samsung, Apple and others. The standards have been designed to be backward compatible from the network side, meaning that satellite-based networks built on future iterations of the standards, including Releases 18, 19 and 20, will be compatible with the majority of handsets already in use. This will provide a huge installed user base ready to access NTN-based services from day one, rather than having to build networks and then wait for users to upgrade to new devices.
Conclusion
The huge benefits of open standards are neatly illustrated by the success of the global mobile phone industry and it’s clear that it is set to play a significant role in satellite-based communications, powered by the same approach. AccelerComm is proud to be playing a key role within 3GPP, bringing our expertise from the terrestrial RAN and combining it with our in-depth knowledge of the satellite space. In addition to the current developments, we are also actively working within the standards groups on future releases which will bring even more enhancements in performance and innovations.
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