Case Study: Lacuna began building a company, ended up building an industry of low-power satcomms
Lacuna formed in 2016 when the only satcoms service available were the options of last resort and therefore high-cost, high-power and proprietary. The concept of founding Lacuna was to take existing low-power protocols and build battery powered satcom devices that would work in remote places for many years from a single charge. More than that, it was also about breaking away from restrictive traditional practices previously used in the Space industry. Satellite companies typically invested heavily to get exclusive use of spectrum and devised proprietary protocols, locking their systems to their own proprietary end-devices. This siloed approach is at odds with the open and collaborative nature that makes “the internet” such a powerful marketplace, and so limits scale of adoption.
Challenging the norms of the incumbent legacy satcoms industry is an ambitious task. ESA and UKSA recognised the potential of Lacuna’s vision and so have provided valuable support via the ARTES programme, to develop the technology and demonstrate its feasibility via in-orbit operations.
Lacuna’s inventive step was to take an open protocol already optimised for low-power use in shared spectrum that was readily available worldwide. By using an existing protocol with off-the-shelf chipsets already available and well-adopted in terrestrial wireless systems, the vast ecosystem of internet solution providers can design and build bespoke end-devices. This opens up a plethora of use cases to satellite by working at a different price point, more comparable to terrestrial tech than the proprietary services offered by legacy satcom.
Lacuna embarked on the challenge of proving these concepts, to show that multi-year battery life was achievable, and that the air interface is robust enough to co-exist with other users in the spectrum, even at the massive scale of a LEO constellation. After their first demonstration missions, funded by ESA and UKSA, Lacuna was able to prove the concept and gain traction with end-users.
By leading the process of standardisation with other industry stakeholder and alliances, Lacuna has also opened these capabilities to a growing group of fast followers, with dozens of new space companies embarking to replicate Lacuna’s concept. As a leading industry analyst said, “Lacuna began by building a company, but ended up building an industry of low-power satellite communication.”. Enabling more satellite providers is a positive indicator for Lacuna and the low-power satellite IoT industry. It shows that the market has scale and gives end-users the confidence that this technology will be pervasive and available from multiple sources with long life, so is a safe technology choice.
To ensure interoperability amongst this growing choice of satcom providers, Lacuna makes its groundbreaking technology available to all. By adopting Lacuna’s LEO payload and internet routing platform these satcom providers accelerate through the years of concept proving and payload development. Lacuna’s payload has flight heritage of ten successful launches and in-orbit operations, offering world-leading capacity which is vital for scaled commercial service, and has taken eight years and five generations to perfect.
The ARTES programme is hugely valuable to enhance Lacuna’s visibility within the space industry, raising awareness of these new technical capabilities and fostering collaboration amongst potential partners. ESA & UKSA support continues beyond the technical phase and evolves along with our scale-up to commercialisation of the service, helping to promote to a global audience of customers and end-users of low-power comms.
With the support of ESA and UKSA via ARTES programme, this innovative “Lacuna Network” concept has already gained traction and continues to scale up with Omnispace in commercial service, dstelecom adding IoT functionality to an upcoming mission, OneWeb flying a technology demonstrator and further soon-to-be-announced partners in production or contract negotiation. These partner constellations are in addition to Lacuna’s existing LEO constellation which is also expanding with six additional satellites currently in production for 2025 launch. Devices, data and delivery platforms are interoperable forming one enhanced service across all these constellations, making adoption as easy as connecting to the internet.