Cross-industry collaboration is incredibly valuable and it’s with this in mind that SIG (Satcoms Innovations Group) works to build strong connections between its membership of technical satcom professionals. Our Meet the Member blog series is designed to give SIG members greater visibility in front of the wider membership, so that members can get to know one another, make new connections and build strong relationships.
In the latest instalment of the SIG Meet the Member Series, we introduce Vega, which has recently joined SIG as a startup member. In this blog, we’ll find out more about Vega’s offering and see how it is working to resolve the operational and technical challenges that satcom currently faces.
Company overview: Vega
Vega is the spectrum coordination layer for satellite operators, helping them understand, optimise, and coordinate their bandwidth. Vega forecasts the radio frequency environment between satellites and the ground, giving operators insight into upcoming passes and opportunities to proactively adjust their signal to ensure performance and reliability.
The platform combines physics-based modelling, hourly real-world observations, and a global pipeline of public spectrum filings. Together, these capabilities give customers a more complete and current understanding of the spectrum environment in which they operate, while keeping their information protected.
What industry challenges are having the biggest influence on your work at the moment?
Congestion in space with a proliferated LEO environment is the whole reason Vega was founded. We have seen the number of satellites grow and the space industry as a whole thrive and evolve, and we want to maintain that growth into the future. As we see it, the two major problems to solve are collision avoidance and interference. Cellular networks have exhibited over 100x more utilisation than satellite signals, which leads us to believe that there is significant room for improvement when it comes to spectrum coordination, so we chose the latter.
What innovative solutions are you working on to address the issue?
Vega combines on-prem AI/ML with physics-informed modelling and signal processing to forecast the RF environment for upcoming satellite passes. We propagate satellite and ground-station geometry forward in time, model fields of regard, and analyse historical patterns of activity to better predict interference conditions. This gives operators the visibility they need to dynamically optimise their downlink and get more data to the ground.
In the future, Vega will facilitate the short-term leasing of spectrum through the platform. Operators will be able to acquire additional spectrum when they need more capacity and monetise spectrum that would otherwise go unused, increasing the bottom line. Transactions and associated data will be processed securely and, where appropriate, anonymously by Vega.
In addition to securely handling customer-provided data, Vega uses modern language models to extract structured information from millions of regulatory filings around the world. This includes data like beam patterns, ground-station locations, frequency assignments, and other technical parameters that enhance our forecasting model. Vega uses this regulatory intelligence to help customers navigate the interference-related portions of the FCC spectrum filing process.
What are your thoughts on spectrum management?
Spectrum management is rapidly becoming the next big problem since traffic laws, something that will not just solve itself. If we want space to go from a niche frontier to ubiquitous infrastructure like automobiles did with Ford and the Model T, then we need to figure out how to coordinate better.
Looking at 5G infrastructure on Earth can provide useful insights into what spectrum management may look like in the future, with a few notable exceptions. With 5G the exchange of spectrum occurs rapidly and in proportion to the needs of every user. Spectrum is not only coordinated by frequency but also geographically and temporally.
Taking spectrum management from the current status quo of long standing billion-dollar exchanges to microleases that are bound in frequency, geography, and timespan not only gives operators more control over their spectrum but also enables it to lift the space industry as a whole. Spectrum management is the bottleneck that limits the space industry's growth now.
How do you think the industry is dealing with virtualisation?
Hardware is expensive. If history is any indicator, the industry is on track to embrace a full virtualisation of most of the existing services.
Cell towers are a great example. In the early days of mobile networks, carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile built their own cell towers. This was considered a competitive advantage over their peers at the time; however, as the market matured, an opportunity presented itself. With now secure incumbents, a new type of supporting business emerged and offered these telecom companies a way to cut their tower costs significantly. These “TowerCo” companies lease real estate to all the carriers allowing each to maintain their coverage with a fraction of the infrastructure they would otherwise need.
This is where virtualisation is headed for in space as well, transitioning from bespoke satellites to hosted payloads and ultimately to proprietary hosted software. As the market matures, more of what was once vertically integrated will become shared, specialised, and available as infrastructure.
Do you have any interesting plans for the next couple of months?
We are aiming to fill out our pilot program slots and launch the beta of our flagship forecasting product by the end of the month.
We are also working hard to develop out the technology and regulatory know how that will allow us to improve how operators leverage their spectrum.
Finally, the team is racing towards a fundraise in early 2027 that will give us the resources to improve spectrum utilisation for all operators and put the power back in the hands of the operators who own the spectrum rather than the ones with the most satellites.
Why do you feel it is important to be a member of SIG?
We are excited to be part of the SIG community and to learn from and interact with all of its members. We saw a special relevance with SIG through its history in understanding and dealing with satellite interference.
Many of the people and organisations in this group are the leading experts on and most affected by satellite interference. We would love to connect with those operators and hear what they experience on a regular basis: where they encounter interference, how they deal with it now, where they feel constrained by the spectrum available to them, and what they wish their satellite neighbours would do to be more considerate.
To find out more about Vega, visit: https://www.vega.space/
To find out more about SIG and to become a member, visit https://satig.space