Europe's answer to Starlink: what IRIS² changes for an office network, and when

Satellite internet has quietly become the default backup link for offices: a dish on the roof as the fallback when the fibre is cut, or the only link at a remote site. In practice that means one provider, Starlink, which works well and costs little. It also means that the link you depend on when everything else has failed is controlled by a single company, under a single jurisdiction, whose terms of service can change faster than any procurement process can follow. This month that dependence was discussed openly in Europe, and the European Commission's answer was a programme most people outside the space industry had not heard of: IRIS².

What IRIS² actually is

Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite: an EU-owned constellation of 348 satellites, 330 in low orbit and 18 in medium orbit, built by the SpaceRISE consortium (SES, Eutelsat, Hispasat). The contracts are now real money. Aerospacelab in Belgium is building 264 of the small satellites for 2.4 billion euro, Airbus at least 66 for government and critical-service use, and OHB in Bremen signed on 31 August for the 18 medium-orbit satellites at just under 1 billion euro. First launches are planned for 2029, with services starting in 2029–2030: governments and critical services first, companies and the public after that. Encryption is planned on the EU's own quantum-key infrastructure, EuroQCI.

Until then, Europe's practical answer is GovSatcom, a pooling of existing European satellite capacity that started in January 2026, with commercial capacity due to be added in early 2027. The Commission's own wording is honest: "we do not start from scratch", and "here we have a way to bridge it until 2029".

Why this matters to an office

Most offices do not run on satellite. But the ones that use it as a backup are using it for exactly one purpose: to be there on the day something has gone wrong. A backup link is worth what its weakest assumption is worth, and "the provider will not change its terms this month" is an assumption, not a contract clause. The point is not that Starlink is a bad choice. Today there is nothing European that replaces it for a small office. The point is to know what your backup link is, who controls it, and what you would do if it were throttled or re-priced at short notice.

What we do about it today

For clients with satellite in the picture, three things:

• We treat the satellite link as a documented dependency, not a mystery box: who owns the account, what the terms allow, what the contract says about service changes.
• Where a second path is possible — a 4G/5G router from a European vendor on a local mobile operator, which is what we use for out-of-band access anyway — we cost it, so the office has two independent ways out instead of one.
• We watch the European option. GovSatcom is for governments; IRIS² for companies is a 2030 conversation. When it is a product with a price list, it goes into our vendor comparison like anything else, with a five-year cost next to the alternatives.

Where the limits are

Europe's constellation has a launcher problem before it has a satellite problem: Ariane 6 has flown four times this year, and a large share of its coming launches is already booked by another constellation. 2029 is a plan, not a promise. We would rather tell you that now than sell you resilience that does not exist yet.

Source: Euronews, 16 October 2026 — "Europe's answer to Starlink: who is building IRIS² and what is Germany's role" (euronews.com)