When emergency services go dark, coordination breaks down. Governments lose visibility at the exact moment they need it most. Recent outages in Australia, where people could not reach emergency services, were not edge cases. They were signals.
Neha Idnani, Regional Vice President for APAC at Eutelsat, talked about what those failures reveal. Modern nations are far more dependent on fragile, ground-based connectivity than most policymakers are willing to admit.
“All that matters is being connected,” Idnani said.
Most national communications infrastructure is optimised for efficiency, not continuity. Fibre, mobile towers, exchanges, all assume physical stability.
That assumption no longer holds. Natural disasters, cyber disruption, sabotage, and conflict increasingly target infrastructure that cannot move, cannot reroute quickly, and cannot self recover.
Satellite connectivity was once treated as optional redundancy. That framing is outdated. Terrestrial networks are a single point of failure.
“Satellite is there to complement terrestrial,” Idnani said.
But when the ground layer fails, complement becomes substitute and substitute becomes critical.
Eutelsat’s OneWeb network is one of only two operational Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations globally. That fact alone should give governments pause.
LEO networks are not quick builds. They require years of deployment, billions in capital, regulatory coordination across jurisdictions and sustained political alignment.
Even then, satellites are useless without ground integration…spectrum access, local infrastructure, domestic telecom partnerships and sovereign approvals.
Idnani mentioned that many countries are still not ready. Some markets remain closed. Others underestimate the work required to operationalise satellite capacity before a crisis hits.
Satellite connectivity functions like backup power, invisible when everything works, indispensable when it doesn’t.
Deployable terminals can be activated in minutes, restoring communications before terrestrial repairs begin. This is already happening.
After Myanmar’s recent earthquake, OneWeb terminals were deployed by Indian forces as the primary source of connectivity in affected areas. Not supplementary. Primary.
This is the reality regulators are now confronting. Critical infrastructure is expected to operate continuously. Terrestrial networks alone cannot meet that standard.
Eutelsat’s model reflects this shift. Encrypted, private satellite networks integrated with domestic carriers like Telstra and Optus in Australia; AT&T and Hughes in the United States and for defence customers, infrastructure that can be owned and operated entirely by the state.
“We build physical infrastructure in a country for defence,” Idnani said, “so that can be owned and operated by the Air Force, the Army, Navy of that country. The traffic can be managed fully by these government agencies.”
That is not a technical detail. It is a sovereignty requirement. Modern connectivity has to survive more than storms.
Jamming, spoofing, cyber intrusion and kinetic threats are now baseline assumptions. OneWeb’s architecture reflects that. Encrypted links, private networking, anti-jamming features and constantly shifting satellite coverage.
No fixed satellite stays connected to a terminal for more than a short window. Interception becomes harder. Disruption becomes less effective.
Eutelsat is not selling a global, one-size-fits-all network. It is building country specific, state-integrated systems designed to operate under national authority.
“We’ve actually made tailor-made solutions,” Idnani said.
Scale without control is dependency. Coverage without sovereignty is risk.
