By Paul Muller, VP BD, and Shailesh Kulkarni, CTO
Attending SATShow Week 2026 was as energizing as ever. And this year, SATShow made one thing clear: The SatCom industry is caught in a high-stakes race between vertical integration and open-market collaboration, and silicon inside the terminals will be a key decision factor. Here our three main take-aways and why Tusk IC has a key role to play in this market.
The Shift to “Sovereign Space” and Interoperability
This year, geopolitics was no longer just a side conversation but front end center. “The geopolitical developments that we’re seeing are creating, far and away, some of the biggest commercial opportunities” said Viasat President and CEO Mark Dankberg, pointing out the “continued focus on the emergence and advancement of multi-orbit and interoperable networks, including the technologies, platforms, and partnerships that will enable seamless integration across orbits and deliver more flexible, resilient services.” Countries want control over their own links, which means they need ground terminals that aren’t locked into a single proprietary constellation.
However, sovereign doesn’t mean small, or government controlled. Enterprise customers equally want to know where their data goes, and who they can rely on to serve their needs when tides turn.
Our protocol-agnostic and interoperable commercial off-the-shelf products, manufactured in the most widely available semiconductor manufacturing processes world wide, fuel the broad market and allow our customers to adapt, endure, and dominate across LEO, MEO, and GEO orbits.
The Supply Chain Dilemma
One of the most candid moments of the week came from Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg, who addressed the elephant in the room: SpaceX. “Procuring technology, satellites, user terminals from third parties puts us at a potential competitive disadvantage to our competitors who are vertically integrated.”
SpinLaunch CEO Massimiliano Ladovaz put the expectations even more bluntly: “Deploying a global constellation at a fraction of today’s cost fundamentally changes the equation: real resiliency, faster deployment, greater autonomy.”
However, SES CEO Adel Al Saleh also emphasized that despite the need for speed, “reliability is non-negotiable” and no “consumer is going to be willing to pay $50 per month”.
For the rest of the industry to compete, it needs a high-performance yet cost-effective merchant-market silicon ecosystem. Our ICs, manufactured in mainstream CMOS technology, are designed to give OEMs access to best-in-class performance at a very competitive price point. Using the most widely available and reliable manufacturing technologies in the market and adding many years of experience in high-reliability safety-critical automotive radar applications, we enable antennas to be protocol-agnostic and level the playing field, opening new doors to broad competition.
The Need for Agility
Geopolitical unpredictability and quickly evolving market landscape call for systems that can evolve quickly while maintaining continuity and service assurance. “The speed of innovation continues to just accelerate we can’t have five- to seven-year development cycles” Al Saleh said. “Whatever you design has to be flexible in a way that you’re able to upgrade it as you go forward. We can’t have five- to seven-year development cycles.”
He added that the company’s “Agility mindset gives us the flexibility to react to the market, to be able to bring new technologies faster, to adjust both from a volume point of view, how much do we need to build and launch every year, as well as how much do you invest depending on what the market needs.” ArkEdge Space CEO Takayoshi Fukuyo doubled down: “The industry is shifting from hardware-defined to Agile, software-defined architectures. The winners will be those who can update, reprogram, and repurpose constellations in orbit, reducing costs and responding to demand in real time.”
Not only are Tusk IC’s products protocol-agnostic and ideally suited for software-defined terminal solutions, moreover our company prides itself on fast innovation cycles, best-in-class talent, and the deployment of Agile methodologies to execute and deliver to our fast-moving customers’ expectations.
The Bottom Line
The vision for 2026 is clear: The future is interoperable, multi-orbit, and sovereign, but that vision can only be realized if the ground terminals are as smart as the satellites they track.
We’re back in the lab, more energized than ever to deliver the beamformer silicon that will power this next era.
