Commissioned Research
Independent satellite communications research, commissioned and scoped to the decision it supports. Figures verified live, sources named, assumptions stated.
Independent satellite communications research, built for a decision you are about to make.
Most research in this sector is written for everyone and therefore for no one. A market-sizing report tells you the segment will reach some number by some year. It does not tell you whether the contract in front of you is priced correctly, whether the constellation you are underwriting will hit its milestones, or which of your suppliers is one refinancing away from a problem.
Real commissions are rarely one clean question. They are a decision with dependencies attached: a thesis that rests on three assumptions, a procurement where the technical answer and the commercial answer point different directions, a diligence file with a gap nobody wants to name. Scope is worked out with you before anything begins, and it follows the decision rather than a template.
Who commissions this work
Four kinds of buyer, and they want different things.
Investors and credit teams underwriting an operator, a supplier or a constellation, who need the operating reality behind the filings rather than a recap of them.
Corporate development and strategy teams at operators and suppliers, sizing an acquisition, a market entry or a partnership, where the internal view is well informed but not independent.
Enterprise and vertical buyers outside satellite communications, in rail, energy, utilities and logistics, who are being sold a solution and have nobody in-house who can tell them what the vendor is not saying.
Vendors and integrators without a strategy function, who need a defensible outside read before a board discussion.
What makes this different from a market report
It is written by someone who ran the business, not someone who covered it.
Forty years in commercial satellite communications: Senior Director of Enterprise Broadband Services at Viasat, and before that iDirect Technologies, PanAmSat, Intelsat and Sagenet, plus a United States Air Force communications supervisor role. Ground segment, service economics and multi-orbit tradeoffs are the working lens, not a research specialism picked up from the outside.
That matters in a specific way. When an operator says a service is available, someone who has sold and delivered that service knows which parts of the sentence are load-bearing.
How the work is verified
This is the section worth reading before you commission anything from anyone.
Every figure is pulled live at the time of use. Market capitalizations, share prices, fleet counts, valuations and market-size estimates come from a fresh source when the sentence is written, never from a prior report or a remembered number.
Two sources minimum on any specific factual claim. Anything that survives on a single source is flagged as single-sourced in the text, where you can see it.
Designed capability and demonstrated capability are held apart. A throughput figure from a datasheet and a throughput figure from an operating network are different claims, and they are labeled differently throughout.
Primary filings, not aggregators. Regulatory and financial claims are sourced from the filing itself. Wire services and third-party mirrors are used to find documents, never to establish their status.
Market-size figures are named, dated and treated skeptically. If a research firm's number appears, you will see whose it is, when it was published, and what it does and does not count.
Every report carries a falsification section. Titled "What would change this view," it states the conditions under which the conclusion fails. Research that cannot be wrong is not research, and a report that will not say what would break it is marketing.
What you receive
Length follows the scope rather than a template. A tightly bounded assessment makes a short document, and a dataset built across thirty entities makes a long one. Scope, including expected length and exhibit count, is agreed in writing before any work starts.
Every report, at any length, contains the same structure: an executive summary with individually extractable findings, numbered sections each opening with a direct answer in the first sentence, exhibits interleaved with sources carried in the captions, the falsification section, and a methodology in which every assumption is named as an assumption.
A structured dataset where the question supports one. A normalized comparison across the relevant entities, every cell sourced and dated. This is usually the part that outlives the report.
A defined data-as-of date and refresh window. You will know exactly how old the numbers are and what a refresh costs.
Sixty minutes with the author on delivery, so your team can ask the questions the document did not anticipate.
Reports are delivered as a portable document format (PDF) file under a named licence: single reader, team, or organization-wide.
Recent work
Satellites Are the Cheap Part: Sizing SpaceX's Mobile Network (August 2026)
An end-to-end sizing of the proposed satellite-plus-femtocell mobile network. The finding was not the one the market expected: the constellation is the affordable half of the problem, and the terrestrial site layer is the binding constraint. The analysis stands or falls on spatial frequency reuse rather than spectrum holdings, and the report says so plainly.
Published in full and available to read. It is the clearest available example of the method described above, including the falsification section.
What it costs
Commissioned work is scoped individually, because a two-week question and a two-month question are not the same product. As an indication, single-buyer commissioned research typically runs in the range of $2,500 to $7,500 depending on depth, dataset construction and licence breadth. Team and organization licences, and the author briefing, are priced as part of the scope.
Terms, invoicing format and delivery are agreed before any work begins.
Start with a conversation
Tell me what you are trying to decide. If it is something I can settle in twenty minutes, I will tell you that instead of selling you a report.