NTN update: Senate preps China ban; certification and testing; Starlink operators and geopolitics

Satellite connectivity is becoming wedged into conventional terrestrial telecom infrastructure, bringing new regulatory, certification, and interoperability requirements alongside its buzzy commercial growth. The US has banned Huawei et al; 3GPP standardization is in process, plus testing too; Japan and Europe want their own systems; and Starlink is all over the place, in commercial operators and geo-politics. In sum – what to know: Regulation – The US Senate’s Secure Space Act would extend FCC security restrictions to satellite licenses, market access and earth stations tied to Covered List entities. Certification – GCF, MSSA and companies including Particle and Skylo are building the standards, testing, and certification to make different flavors of NTN interoperable. Commercial scale – Starlink is pushing D2D into more markets, notably in Africa, as Japan and Europe develop alternative satellite-connectivity ecosystems. The US Senate has passed legislation to put a new security gate around satellite connectivity, essentially to stretch the US ban on Chinese tech to space systems. The Senate passed the Secure Space Act of 2026 (S. 1962) on Wednesday (September 23) by unanimous consent. The bill now goes back to the House, for further consideration – before it becomes law. It comes as non-terrestrial networks (NTN) become increasingly integrated with commercial mobile networks and critical comms infrastructure. A number of news items from the week tell this story. The new Senate legislation would amend the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019 to prevent the FCC from granting US satellite licenses, market access, or related earth-station authorizations to entities on the FCC’s Covered List, or their affiliates. The list includes Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, plus operators including China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – among other (Chinese and non-Chinese) companies and categories of comms equipment and services. The FCC will have a year to issue implementing rules. The move underlines that even space systems, unbounded in flight by terrestrial geography, are increasingly being pulled into terrestrial security rules. Standards and certification Meanwhile, the telco industry at large is working to make standardized NTN systems interoperable and easier to certify for commercial deployment, nominally as a complement to traditional terrestrial networks. The Global Certification Forum (GCF) and Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA) have signed a cooperation deal (MoU) to develop certification requirements and testing frameworks for standards-based NTN services. Their work covers the two main 3GPP approaches: NTN 5G NR, aimed at broadband data and voice applications, and NTN NB-IoT, for low-power IoT devices. It also covers direct-to-device (D2D) services more broadly, including connections using LTE (4G) and 5G. They want a scalable certification model to support interoperability and roaming with terrestrial networks, as well as between different NTN constellations. GCF has had NTN NB-IoT conformance testing for GEO systems since 2024; it wants to extend certification to NGSO/LEO systems, and to add NTN 5G NR. The M635e module from Particle, part of Digi International, has achieved Skylo certification, for example. It combines LTE-M and 2G with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Skylo’s NTN NB-IoT (NB-NTN) satellite service – and is pitched as a fallback when terrestrial coverage fails. Particle describes it as an IoT-NTN product – different to NTN 5G NR (NR-NTN) or D2D smartphone services. Which matters; NTN is not one technology or service category, clearly. A low-power NB-IoT tracker is very different to a smartphone, even if both are described as ‘direct-to-device’. Markets and geo-politics In case it needs saying, Starlink is the best example of NTN moving into commercial mobile services. It has been in the news for all kinds of reasons (again). Airtel Africa launched Starlink Mobile in the Democratic Republic of Congo in August – as the first commercial Starlink Mobile deployment in Africa, says Airtel. It has just announced the same in Uganda – as the second. An Airtel message on social media said the service will connect “millions of people in rural and remote communities with apps and messaging where cell signal isn’t available”. The firm signed with Starlink in December (2025), testing the service in Kenya in March. Airtel says expansion across other markets depends on country-specific regulatory approvals – another reminder, in case, that technical availability does not automatically translate into commercial availability. MTN Zambia completed a successful D2D test in March; AXIAN Telecom is working with AST SpaceMobile to launch the same. Meanwhile, Starlink has told maritime customers they can expect gigabit-per-second throughput with their $2,000 (Performance Gen 3) ground terminals by the end of the year, once SpaceX’s new V3 satellites are in service. (This is for conventional broadband connectivity via a physical terminal; not Starlink Mobile.) The company’s network expansion is happening in tandem with its more fraught and complex role in geopolitical comms and security. In Poland, a fire at a Starlink-connected satellite station in the Masovian region has been described by deputy prime minister Krzysztof Gawkowski as an “act of sabotage” intended to disrupt connectivity, including Ukrainian army comms. An investigation is ongoing. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has cautioned against definitively labelling the incident sabotage before there is certainty. The station remained operational. Elsewhere, Finnish president Alexander Stubb has asked SpaceX to expand Starlink coverage in areas where Ukraine wants to target Russian ballistic-missile launchers. (And in a speech at the UN General Assembly, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a Starlink Mini while discussing internet access in Iran.) Resilience and sovereignty Meanwhile, Japan is putting government money behind an alternative approach, with its comms ministry supporting development of compact universal satellite antennas. Japanese operators are already using Starlink for direct-to-device services, while Rakuten has been pursuing an AST SpaceMobile-based alternative. Which echoes, broadly, Europe’s efforts to build secure and resilient satellite connectivity through its IRIS² project – as covered in these pages at some length. The first phase of Europe’s IRIS² project is scheduled for launch by the end of 2029. In August, the EU concluded negotiations around IRIS² governance, technical configuration, and financing and confirmed its main suppliers. It has also begun exploring international cooperation around IRIS². In September it agreed with South Korea to examine future integration, including technical cooperation and use cases. Which puts Europe on a different track from Starlink’s vertically integrated model: a publicly backed strategic connectivity play built around European institutions, governments and industry partners, with security and resilience as the rationale. But there are a lot of hurdles, or gates, in here: the regulatory gate represented by the Secure Space Act; the certification and interoperability gate represented by GCF and MSSA; the product qualification gate represented by Skylo-certified devices; and the deployment and capacity gate represented by Starlink Mobile and the next generation of satellite capacity.