Satellite Stars for Orange at OpenTech 2025

It was great to be back in Paris this week to attend Orange’s innovation and technology event, OpenTech. This is the third year for the showcase, which brought together hundreds of employees, partners, start-ups, customers and the media under the tagline Unleash the Value. You can also read my reviews of the company’s 2023 and 2024 events.

In the main keynote, chief technology and innovation officer, Bruno Zerbib, referenced the accelerating pace of innovation in areas such as AI and quantum technologies, which he said has fuelled two strong convictions for the operator.

Firstly, he stated that innovation is only important if it brings about progress, which he defined as delivering outcomes and solving problems for people. Secondly, he highlighted Orange’s scientific excellence, noting that a third of the near-50 demonstrations at the event drew on work from its 700 researchers, including 120 PhD students.

Mr Zerbib also explained that he’s often asked if he sees connectivity as a commodity. He believes that this isn’t fully the case yet, pointing to the significant amount of intelligence in Orange’s networks that can support services varying from verifying banking customers to providing bandwidth to influencers uploading video at a concert.

Orange France CEO Jerome Henrique expanded on this theme, pointing out that Orange has a goal of connecting everyone everywhere through a range of technologies. This led into the event’s main announcement — a partnership with Skylo to offer a direct-to-device satellite service. Branded Message Satellite, it enables customers to send SMS and share their location in places where they cannot connect to the Orange cellular network or Wi-Fi, so extending connectivity to the hardest-to-reach places.

The satellite service is scheduled to go live for consumer customers in France on 11 December, which is set to make Orange the first operator in Europe to launch such a service. Access for business customers will follow soon after. The service will initially be available to Orange’s 5G and 5G+ customers, free for six months and then priced at €5 per month.

At first, the service will only work on Google’s Pixel 9 and 10 devices, representing a very limited set of customers. Orange wouldn’t be drawn on its plans to include other devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S25, which is being offered by US carrier Verizon as part of its own tie-up with Skylo.

Orange’s decision to partner with Skylo is likely to reflect the satellite company’s use of mobile-satellite service (MSS) spectrum. This makes access easier in multiple markets as it circumvents the challenges of coordinating spectrum usage across borders, an important consideration for Europe. It contrasts with the recent announcement of a planned launch by Virgin Media O2 in the UK, in partnership with Starlink, slated for the first half of 2026.

It was great to see the service in action. Clearly, a demonstration in a built-up neighbourhood in south-west Paris could never come close to duplicating a remote environment, but it wasn’t lost on me that the smartphone being used was communicating with an object in geostationary orbit, tens of thousands of kilometres away, travelling at thousands of kilometres an hour.

Inevitably, there was a slight lag in pairing with the satellite and then delivering the test SMS, but given the distances involved, it represented an impressive technological achievement. If someone is outside terrestrial coverage, they probably won’t be too concerned about a short delay if it means being able to get in touch with friends, family or the emergency services.

My colleague Joe Gardiner shared more thoughts on the announcement and what it means in this post on LinkedIn.

Beyond satellite communications, there was plenty of other innovation on show. Four demonstrations in particular caught my eye.

Orange Energies is an internet of things platform that can connect and remotely manage a wide range of equipment, such as solar panels and smart sensors, to enable people living in rural “off grid” locations to access electricity for their personal needs or to help them set up a business. A leading feature is a prepayment model enabled through Orange Money to guarantee payment for the energy consumed. The service has been deployed in 12 countries in Africa and the Middle East, with more set to follow, and currently reaches about 900,000 households, benefitting 6 million people.

To help secure large-scale critical infrastructure, Orange has developed a network API platform, directly accessible by enterprise customers, that can allocate resources depending on different scenarios. It integrates with a client’s digital twin, developed by French start-up Optimaize. In a live demonstration, I was shown a 5G-connected surveillance drone that detected a suspicious event at an airport. Using Orange’s identity, anti-fraud and geolocation APIs, the event could be authenticated and its exact position confirmed. A 4K video, ensured by a quality-on-demand API, helped identify the intruder and dispatch a security team.

Family Protection is a mobile app being developed by Orange to enable families to securely share sensitive documents or passwords used in the home, help each other remotely with screen sharing, or diagnose suspicious content. It includes an AI tool to answer questions or direct users to educational resources. The tool builds on the launch of Orange Cybersecure in 2024 to protect consumer customers from fraud.

LiveMemo uses a generative AI assistant to summarize phone calls for field workers such as service technicians and salespeople, with the aim of reducing the amount of paperwork they have to complete. The text can subsequently be edited and shared with other people. First announced at the VivaTech show a few months ago, it now offers language support beyond French, including Dutch and some African languages and dialects.

I was grateful to Orange for the invitation to attend the event and look forward to watching the progress of the services it presented.