An official approval has propelled the low-orbit satellite Internet of Things into large-scale development.
Over the past decade, China's commercial aerospace industry has launched hundreds of satellites into space. But the real challenge is not this step.
After satellites are put into orbit, the real problem facing all participants is how to achieve continuous paid usage of these space assets. Globally, the number of companies that can realize large-scale commercial implementation of low-orbit satellite IoT can be counted on one hand.
In the commercial aerospace circle, most people may still take it for granted that the next inflection point will come from a technological breakthrough, such as lower launch costs brought by reusable rockets, and larger constellations brought by mass manufacturing. However, as low-orbit satellites gradually complete network deployment, the industry has begun to realize that what truly determines the competitive landscape in the second half of commercial aerospace is not just technology, but who can take the lead in completing the leap from "building constellations" to "operating networks".
This year, this inflection point has seen an important landmark.
Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved the commercial test license for satellite IoT services, with a test period of two years. Geespace has become the first private enterprise in China to obtain this approval. This means that the satellite IoT operation business of private enterprises has been officially incorporated into the national telecommunications regulatory system for pilot implementation. Relying on its self-owned constellation, Geespace can provide global users with wide-coverage, low-power, highly reliable connection services, and simultaneously carry out IoT NTN technology tests to promote the R&D and commercial application of key 6G satellite communication technologies.
In the field of low-orbit satellites, the weight of this approval is far more than just adding a business qualification to private companies. More importantly, it means that China's satellite IoT has begun to enter a new stage from "building networks" to "operating networks".
In 2026, the satellite Internet was included in the government work report as a separate item for the first time, and then incorporated into 109 major projects of the 15th Five-Year Plan; in April, the China National Space Administration and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued the Commercial Aerospace Standard System (Version 1.0). From the government work report to the 15th Five-Year Plan, and then to the construction of the industry standard system, the signal released at the national level is very clear: commercial aerospace is moving from the technology verification stage to the window period of full industrialized implementation.
The approval is landed right at this critical juncture.
It can be said that this approval is not only an institutional confirmation of the industrial capacity accumulation over the past decade, but also an important starting point for China's satellite IoT to move towards large-scale commercial operation. The signal it releases is very clear: in the future industry competition, the competition will no longer only focus on the number of satellites, but on who can build a stable, safe and continuously operating satellite communication network that truly serves industries and users.
Judging from the capabilities demonstrated by the approved enterprises this time, the answer has gradually become clear: the real competition in commercial aerospace is shifting from "manufacturing satellites and forming constellations" to "operating networks", and from "capacity building" to "value realization".
Geespace Constellation
01. Rules are more scarce than technology
Why is a commercial test approval regarded as an industrial inflection point?
Wang Yang, CEO of Geespace, has a judgment: when a new infrastructure industry truly matures, it is not that technology becomes more complex, but that rules become clearer.
All infrastructure industries have to go through three stages: technology maturity, rule maturity, and market maturity.
Today's low-orbit satellite IoT is at the critical position of evolving from the second stage to the third stage. The technology can already support large-scale applications, and constellation capabilities, terminal products and industry applications are all moving towards maturity. However, whether terminal manufacturers, industry customers and operators dare to invest money and resources in the long term depends on whether the rules can provide deterministic expectations.
Without definite rules, participants in the industry can only stay in project-based and phased cooperation. No one dares to make long-term investments in R&D, products and markets, and the industry cannot form real scale effects.
This is exactly where the industrial significance of the approval lies: operating under long-term rules will become the new normal of the industry, delivering a determinacy that the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain can bet on.
In addition, to understand why this approval is so scarce, we must first see how difficult the low-orbit satellite IoT business itself is.
The low-orbit satellite IoT constellation is essentially an infrastructure built in space. To become a chain-leading enterprise in this field, a company must get through the full chain capabilities including constellation system design, satellite R&D, mass production AIT of satellites, constellation measurement, operation and control, as well as R&D, mass production and application of core chips, modules and terminals. None of the full-chain capabilities is dispensable.
As long as one link relies on external parties, large-scale services will face great challenges.
This is very different from the consumer-grade satellite Internet. The latter competes for bandwidth and speed, and can quickly make up for shortcomings through external procurement of certain links; while the IoT constellation competes for coverage, reliability and long-term stability, any weak link will be magnified infinitely.
More critically, this is a business with heavy assets, long cycles and slow returns. The investment payback period is long, and value can only be realized through long-term cooperation with operators and vertical industry customers, which naturally blocks out enterprises that pursue short-term returns and are eager to create capital stories.
The threshold is so high that globally, there are very few commercial aerospace enterprises that have achieved large-scale implementation, and most players are still stuck in the first two stages of capacity building and scale construction.
Market maturity, that is, large-scale commercial implementation, is a huge gap across the entire industry. The superposition of technical thresholds and commercial gaps determines that approvals will not be issued widely, and the marked inflection point is sufficiently scarce and weighty.
It is precisely for this reason that the domestic enterprises that can take the lead in obtaining this approval must be the most well-prepared players among them.
Wang Yang's three-stage theory of "capacity building, scale construction, and value realization" is an important industry cognitive anchor. Its subtext is that once the barrier from capacity expansion to scale expansion is broken through, that is, the catalytic effect brought by clear rules, the industrial expansion speed will be significantly accelerated.
Only when all participants obtain long-term expectations and dare to truly invest resources can value be realized.
In 2018, when Wang Yang founded Geespace, the entire commercial aerospace industry was still solving the problem of "whether it can be done". The industry was generally chasing the consumer-grade track of high-speed broadband, but he chose the satellite IoT road that few people took.
At that time, this track did not have an independent industrial classification, but he was optimistic about the underlying logic: higher user concentration, stronger payment capacity, more stable demand, and the revenue is closer to the long-term service income of infrastructure, rather than the traffic monetization model of consumer Internet.
Nowadays, peers are still competing on technology, but he has already started to prepare for large-scale operations after the rules mature.
Thus, under the rule dividend of approved operation, Geespace has occupied a unique ecological niche.
02. Why Geespace?
The maturity of rules brings more opportunities. Then, apart from starting earlier, why can Geespace become one of the very few private enterprises that take the lead in obtaining approval?
The answer lies in the access threshold for approval: the application conditions for commercial test approval are far stricter than the outside world imagines.
According to the Notice on Organizing and Carrying out Commercial Tests of Satellite IoT Services issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the applying enterprise must meet five core requirements at the same time: it has obtained the satellite mobile frequency use license and space radio station license; the constellation construction project has been approved by the National Development and Reform Commission; it has an in-orbit serviceable satellite system and supporting ground operation and control support system; it has complete network security, data security and emergency support capabilities; it can provide long-term and stable services across the country.
This means that the approved enterprise must not only own satellites, but also have a complete capability system covering the space segment, ground segment, operation services and security guarantee, and can truly undertake the operation and services of satellite IoT nationwide and even globally.
The superposition of the five conditions means that the approved party must hold five tickets at the same time: frequency orbit resources, project approval, in-orbit system, security capability, and long-term service capability.
This is also where most players are "locked out". If the constellation networking is not completed, industry services are out of the question; if it relies on external technologies, security compliance is out of the question; if commercial verification is not completed, long-term stable services are out of the question.
Looking at each item individually, many enterprises have crossed the threshold, but to hold all five items at the same point in time, there are not many eligible enterprises. Geespace has crossed the threshold in every item, becoming one of the few domestic enterprises that can meet all five requirements at the same time.
The confidence to cross the five conditions comes from a complete industrial chain.
Different from other commercial aerospace enterprises, Geespace's capability chain extends all the way from constellation system design, satellite R&D and manufacturing to chips, modules, terminals and industry applications, and it independently develops everything from "the space network" to "ground terminals".
From the perspective of business attributes, this company is forming dual capabilities similar to "China Mobile + Huawei": network operation and user connection are the strengths of operators, while communication technology R&D and terminal industrial chain are the fields of equipment vendors. These two things usually belong to two types of companies, but Geespace has integrated them into the same system.
When it comes to the specific capabilities of this company, we can look at it from three dimensions.
Network capability is the foundation and the physical premise for obtaining the approval. Most players are still in the networking stage, while Geespace has 64 satellites in orbit with 100% reliability, which can process about 340 million communication requests every day, serve 20 million users, and achieve global communication coverage except for the North and South Poles.
What is more difficult to replicate is the self-developed security base. Full-stack self-development, plus self-developed communication system and private protocol, make Geespace irreplaceable in scenarios with extremely high security requirements such as intelligent connected vehicles, energy, and transportation.
Such scenarios have far higher requirements for data security and link anti-interference than ordinary commercial services, and the cost of interruption or leakage is huge, while compliance and security boundaries are the most valued part of approved operations.
Differentiated positioning opens up the ceiling of large-scale development. Geespace focuses on the UHF/VHF frequency band, pursues "always on", and accurately occupies the ecological niche of the ultimate backup network. Combined with miniaturized, low-power terminals, it fully explains why this company can take the lead in running through the approval issuance window period.
Behind the capabilities is long-term strategic determination. Starting early, going deep into no man's land, and choosing the long-term infrastructure subscription business, it has built today's barriers.
In China, Geespace has completed commercial verification tests in cooperation with more than 20 leading enterprises such as China Unicom, PetroChina, Geely Auto, and CaoCao Mobility; during the recently concluded MWC (Mobile World Congress) Shanghai exhibition this year, it has accumulated cooperation intentions with more than 200 ecological partners, the signed orders have exceeded 100 million yuan, and its business territory covers ten core real economy tracks including intelligent connected vehicles, marine fisheries, smart agriculture, construction machinery, energy, low-altitude economy, and emergency communications.
The order figures are a very positive signal, proving that Geespace, which has entered the era of licensed operation, will no longer stay in the dimension of demonstrative and project-based cooperation, and is entering a truly repurchasable and scalable commercial stage.
03. From networking competition to value realization
The barriers have been built, and they will eventually be converted into commercial value.
After obtaining approval, where is the new valuation logic of satellite IoT, and how to quantify its market value?
Overseas markets have already provided a reference. SpaceX's total revenue in the first half of 2026 was 12.506 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 53.7%. Starlink contributed the largest share of revenue, with an operating profit of 2.844 billion US dollars, making it the company's strongest profit engine. What supports SpaceX's high valuation has shifted from rocket launch capabilities to the continuous profitability of Starlink as the world's largest low-orbit satellite communication operation network.
In the domestic market, at least from the perspective of Geespace, the approval has also pushed the company's growth logic from project-based delivery to a continuous service revenue model, which will also become an important basis for the entire industry's future value revaluation.
The leap of commercial logic is most intuitively reflected in globalization. Geespace has established cooperation with telecom operators in more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions, and has obtained orders in multiple markets such as the Middle East and South America. It will promote the delivery of these orders in 2026. Along with going global, the revenue structure is shifting from one-time projects to long-term service subscriptions.
For the capital market, the switch from selling projects to selling services also means predictable cash flow and a higher valuation multiplier.
Opening up to the industry is another path worthy of attention. During MWC Shanghai this year, Geespace released the world's first full-stack open source ecosystem for low-orbit communication constellations, opening capability interfaces to operators, chip manufacturers and system integrators to lower the industry entry threshold.
The maturity of an infrastructure industry never depends on a single company to complete it alone, but on the growth of a complete ecosystem around it. In essence, open source is Geespace converting its proven capabilities into reusable underlying assets for the industry, thereby promoting the market to mature faster.
After the completion of the first phase of networking, Geespace's next step is to accelerate the construction of the second phase of the constellation and continue to improve the service capability of the constellation system. Looking further ahead, it is betting on 6G:
Ground networks are constrained by geographical conditions, and oceans, deserts, plateaus, and low altitudes have long been communication blind zones. The core proposition of 6G is to deeply integrate satellite networks with terrestrial cellular networks to realize all-domain communication integrating space and ground.
In the 3GPP system, this path is divided into two technical directions: IoT NTN is oriented to massive low-power IoT terminals, focusing on wide coverage and low power consumption, adapting to industry scenarios such as construction machinery, marine fisheries, energy and water conservancy, and is the most easily implemented commercial track at present; NR NTN is based on the 5G NR framework, oriented to direct satellite connection of mobile phones, supporting voice and low-speed data transmission, and is the ultimate form of 6G NTN.
The relationship between the two is complementary and evolutionary. First, use IoT NTN to run through industry verification and accumulate in-orbit data, then evolve to NR NTN, and open up the B-end and C-end markets successively.
The current consensus is that 6G will bring a window period for China's commercial aerospace. The existing low-orbit constellations in the United States do not natively support the 6G NTN protocol. When 6G is massively networked, the existing satellites of Starlink will face the pressure of expiring service life and overall replacement, and for the first