Stakeholders in direct-to-device services have to act now to defend their interests at the WRC-27

Last February, I wrote that the merger of the satellite and terrestrial cellular industry was not yet a marriage made in heaven. However, at the Mobile World Congress , held last March in Barcelona, I noticed that Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) and direct-to-device (D2D) services received an exceptional amount of attention from the cellular industry. In the months since that event, I have seen many new announcements of the leading operators of D2D satellite services. It concerned here as well legacy satellite operators that will provide their services using their Mobile Satellite Service (MSS)-spectrum as new market entrants, who have developed their services to leverage Mobile Service (MS) spectrum from their Mobile Network Operator (MNO) partners to deliver their services to unmodified cellular handset and devices.