- Orange France is the first European operator to offer direct-to-device satellite messaging to its customers
- The service uses Skylo's technology and works with newer model Pixel phones
- But some analysts say Skylo's satellite service, which works via GEO satellites, won't be able to expand to advanced applications because of latency issues
Orange France is the first European wireless operator to launch a satellite text messaging service. Orange is working with Skylo to launch its Message Satellite service on December 11.
The service initially will be available to Orange’s 5G and 5G+ customers who own a Google Pixel 9 or 10 smartphone and who live in mainland France. They’ll be able to send and receive SMS messages as well as their geolocation via satellite when mobile or Wi-Fi coverage is unavailable. The service will be available for use in France and 27 other countries.
Skylo’s service is natively embedded in the Google Pixel 9 and 10 family of smartphones, and available for emergency messaging, regardless of which wireless provider a phone owner uses.
Tarun Gupta, Skylo’s co-founder and chief product officer, recently told Fierce that Pixel has enabled satellite messaging for their series 9 and 10 users in 28 countries to communicate with emergency response services over satellite when out of Wi-Fi or cellular coverage and there is a clear view of the sky.
The advantage of Skylo’s partnership with a mobile network operator — such as Orange — is that customers with Google Pixel 9 and 10 smartphones can then also conduct peer-to-peer texting over satellite so they can stay in contact with friends and relatives who also own the select Pixel devices, using their same phone number and SIM as provided by Orange.
According to Orange, the technology is perfectly suited for environments such as outdoor adventures like mountaineering, traveling in areas with no coverage in France or abroad, and reaching emergency services.
The “Message Satellite” service will be available as a free option for the first six months, then at a price of €5 per month. Orange said, “Subsequently, Message Satellite will be enriched in terms of services and compatible handsets.”
Orange didn’t specify which compatible handsets, but Skylo’s satellite service is also supported by the Samsung Galaxy S25 family of phones.
Europe’s race toward D2D
Analyst Joe Gardiner with CCS Insight noted on LinkedIn that Deutsche Telekom has also been working with Skylo and planning to announce a D2D service by the end of 2025, but Orange beat them to it.
Of Orange’s partnership with Skylo, Gardiner wrote, “This is a major endorsement for the Mobile Satellite Service spectrum (MSS) approach in Europe. Skylo's use of MSS is clearly an appealing factor for major European operators.”
But he added, “Given that Skylo uses geostationary satellites (instead of Low-Earth orbit satellites) the range of applications they will be able to provide will be more limited due to concerns around latency. This isn't a problem currently as most low-Earth orbit services are just offering texting, but it will be interesting to see how these service capabilities develop over the next few years.”
Chiming in with a similar sentiment, Recon Analytics principal Roger Entner said, "Skylo is fitting a niche right now, that of D2C texting. This is an intermediate step as we will expect satellite communications to provide not only text, but data, voice and video capabilities. This is not going to work with GEO satellites. Starlink, AST and Apple with Globalstar are solving or are the process of solving that gap."
Broadcasting emergency messages from space
In other European satellite news today, OQ Technology, a European D2D satellite connectivity provider with 60 MHz of MSS S-band spectrum, has used its LEO satellite constellation to demonstrate an emergency broadcast message from space — transmitted directly to standard smartphones without any hardware or software modifications.
OQ can transmit an emergency broadcast message directly to both iPhone and Android devices. The company said such capability is vital for public warning systems, disaster recovery and communications resilience that remains operational when terrestrial networks are compromised.