• Orange and Telesat have commissioned the first European gateway for the Lightspeed low-Earth-orbit network at Bercenay-en-Othe in France
  • Orange will connect the site to Telesat's planned Paris point of presence, while commercial service still depends on the wider constellation and ground network

The fact

Orange and Telesat have commissioned the first European gateway for the Telesat Lightspeed low-Earth-orbit network at Orange's Bercenay-en-Othe teleport in France. The site will support Lightspeed's planned initial constellation of 225 satellites and uses gateway antennas supplied by Intellian Technologies.

Orange will provide a secure high-speed terrestrial connection from Bercenay-en-Othe towards a planned Telesat point of presence in Paris. That link will carry traffic between the satellite ground segment and terrestrial carrier and customer networks.

The gateway is installed and commissioned, but Lightspeed is not yet commercially available in Europe. Service still depends on the satellite constellation, additional ground infrastructure and completion of the terrestrial network ahead of the planned 2028 launch.

The assessment

Bercenay gives Telesat somewhere in Europe to test the ground side of Lightspeed before commercial service begins. Once traffic lands there, Orange's network has to carry it onward to Paris and into customer networks. That terrestrial hand-off is part of the service path, not a separate detail.

Lightspeed's optical inter-satellite links are designed to let traffic move between spacecraft before it comes back to Earth. That can create more choice over where traffic lands, but resilience still depends on what happens after the downlink. Two different satellite routes are less useful if they eventually rely on the same gateway, fibre path or point of presence.

For BTW readers, Bercenay closes one part of the network build rather than completing the European service. The real test comes when the satellites, gateway, Paris interconnection and customer circuits can operate together and recover cleanly when one part of that path fails.

What to watch

Watch for the Paris point of presence to enter service, additional European gateways and end-to-end Lightspeed trials. Disclosures on alternative landing sites, terrestrial routes and failover behaviour will show how much path diversity customers can actually expect.