The Third-Party Punts and the Pre-Profit Gamble
Not every interesting story in this sector involves Amazon or SpaceX. If you are willing to look beyond the mega-cap technology giants, there are smaller, listed companies offering entirely different angles on the satellite broadband shift.
Consider AST SpaceMobile. ASTS is pursuing something genuinely distinct and, frankly, a little audacious. Rather than building a standalone internet service that requires you to bolt a physical dish to your roof, ASTS is attempting to construct a space-based cellular broadband network.
The proposition is simple but technically daunting. They want your existing, everyday smartphone to connect directly to their satellites. No special hardware. No expensive receiver. Just a standard mobile phone pinging a mast floating in low earth orbit.
In 2021, the idea of a direct-to-cell satellite network felt like a distant science fiction concept. Then, ASTS started securing partnerships with major terrestrial mobile network operators. The narrative shifted. They are not trying to compete with telecom providers. They want to license their orbital capacity to them, allowing carriers to eliminate cellular dead zones completely.
The addressable market here is undeniably enormous. The risks are equally colossal.
ASTS is a pre-profit company. They are engaged in a hyper-capital-intensive build programme. Execution risk is not just a footnote for a company like this. It is the entire story. Regulatory approvals across multiple sovereign borders add a labyrinth of complexity. If they pull it off, the upside could be substantial. If they encounter technical failures or funding droughts, the share price might suffer severe, unforgiving corrections. This is a proposition for those who can stomach extreme volatility, not a place to park your pension.
Then you have Globalstar. GSAT occupies a much quieter, more defensive corner of the room. They are an established provider of mobile satellite services and infrastructure. They already have a constellation. They already have a customer base in industries where connectivity is quite literally a matter of life and death, such as maritime, aviation, and remote industrial operations.
Globalstar is not trying to beat Starlink at the consumer broadband game. They are better understood as an infrastructure player. Their existing revenues and operational track record provide a degree of stability that pure-play growth names simply cannot offer. The upside case rests on whether the broader space economy drives incremental demand for their established services. It will not deliver the same meteoric potential as ASTS, but it carries a vastly different risk profile.