The Arab Satellite Communications Organization, or Arabsat, has signed a slew of deals starting and advancing a number of relationships including Telesat and Quadsat.
The deals were announced at this year’s CABSAT 2025 event, held in Dubai.
On 14 May, the company signed a term sheet for a multi-gigabit per second capacity pool with Telesat Lightspeed, building upon the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with the company in 2024.
“With the term sheet now finalized, both companies will be focused on completing definitive documents by the end of the year,” Yanniv Betito, regional vice president of EMEA at Telesat, told DCD.
“Telesat Lightspeed satellite launches will begin in late 2026 and Arabsat will be one of the first customers participating in field trials before global services commence at the end of 2027.”
Arabsat heralded the agreement as a step toward their multi-orbit strategy, taking advantage of blended connectivity for a better resiliency of performance, bolstering their provision to their areas of focus in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and Europe, and providing a degree of sovereign control over the technology.
“[Lightspeed’s] architecture provides maximum flexibility and scalability for Arabsat to define, configure, manage, and modify services to their end customers, independent of Telesat,” Betito said.
“From a reliability standpoint, Telesat Lightspeed services are have guaranteed performance and are backed by service level agreements (SLAs), along with a Zero-Trust security architecture.
On the same day, the company signed its first MoU with Quadsat, the UAV-based antennas testing and RF measurement provider to assist with performance validation, maintenance, and calibration, as well as geolocation of unwanted signals on Arabsat’s fleet.
The agreement will involve bespoke test and measurement equipment for Arabsat as well as a standard report format for the company’s antenna technology.
“The [agreement’s] service architecture provides maximum flexibility and scalability for Arabsat to define, configure, manage, and modify services to their end customers, independent of Telesat,” said Dr. Badr Alsuwaidan, SVP and CTO at Arabsat.
“From a reliability standpoint, Telesat Lightspeed services have guaranteed performance and are backed by service-level agreements (SLAs), along with a Zero-Trust security architecture.”
