LeoSat pre-signs first customer for LEO network

Low-earth-orbit satellite network operator startup LeoSat Enterprises has signed up its first customer – a globally operating financial trading company.

LeoSat is building a constellation of up to 108 low-earth-orbit communications satellites that aim to provide fiber-like speeds with lower latency than traditional satellite and terrestrial networks.

The financial trading company customer plans to take advantage of this low latency to improve its automated algorithmic trading efficiency.

LeoSat can offer an average round trip latency of less than 93ms from London to Tokyo and under 119ms from Singapore to London, by using optical inter-satellite links to create fiber-like symmetry at Gigabit speeds.

Data is also encrypted and secured from end-to-end across the network, with no terrestrial touch points to expose the data.

“We are excited to be in a position to announce our first customer almost four years ahead of the commercial launch of our system and while doing so, also venture into a market sector where traditional satellite systems have never had any suitable product offering,” LeoSat chief commercial officer Ronald van der Breggen said.

“In addition to it being proof of our claim to be a game changer in the satellite communication industry, we take this customer contract as a very strong endorsement of our plans to offer global, low-latency, high-throughput satellite capacity, using a Low Earth Orbit constellation.”

He said the company has already seen a high level of interest from the finance, enterprise, government and energy sectors ahead of the planned launch.