The 2026 Direct-to-Device Race: Starlink, AST, Lynk, Globalstar, Amazon, and the New European Entrants

Direct-to-device (D2D) satellite-to-smartphone connectivity has, over the last 36 months, transformed from an experimental category into one of the most contested neighborhoods in the entire commercial space economy. The promise is simple and large: every smartphone on Earth becomes a candidate satellite terminal, with no special hardware required. The execution is anything but simple. Closing the radio link to an unmodified handset is a hard physics problem, integrating with terrestrial mobile networks is a hard regulatory and standards problem, and competing with vertically integrated giants like SpaceX while also depending on telco partnerships is a hard commercial problem. As of April 2026, half a dozen serious operators are in the field with very different architectural and commercial bets — and French startup Univity's €27M Series A on April 23, 2026 added the first major European-headquartered entrant to the mix.

Understanding how these players differ — and which European telcos, regulators, and capital allocators are likely to back which architecture — has become a strategic question for anyone building or investing in commercial space. We map the major players, the architectural choices that distinguish them, the spectrum and regulatory path each has taken, and where the new European entrants like Univity fit in.

The Players, Architectures, and Spectrum

The Three Architectural Camps

The seven major D2D operators in 2026 cluster into three architectural camps, each with its own strategic logic. The first camp — Starlink Direct-to-Cell, AST SpaceMobile, and Lynk Global — operates standard or near-standard LEO constellations and solves the link-budget problem at the satellite end through some combination of large antennas (AST), modified shells (Starlink), and acceptance of limited initial services like SMS (Lynk). The second camp — Globalstar/Apple and Iridium Project Stardust — leverages legacy MSS constellations and MSS spectrum, with the strategic advantage of already having the spectrum allocations and a fully built constellation, and the disadvantage of older satellite designs that are harder to upgrade for high-bandwidth services. The third camp — Univity and a small number of similarly architected entrants — operates in VLEO with licensed terrestrial 5G NTN spectrum, betting that the link-budget advantages of low altitude plus the standards-compatibility advantages of 5G NTN will outweigh the operational cost of fighting drag.

Spectrum: The Defining Strategic Choice

Spectrum strategy is arguably the single most consequential architectural choice in D2D. Borrowing terrestrial mobile spectrum from a carrier partner (Starlink/T-Mobile, Lynk's per-country deals) is fast to market because no new spectrum allocations are required, but it ties the operator to specific carrier partnerships and limits the addressable market to those carriers' subscribers. Operating in MSS spectrum (Globalstar, Iridium, AST L-band) provides global reach and clean regulatory standing but requires handsets to support those bands — which has historically been a chicken-and-egg problem solved only by Apple's willingness to integrate Globalstar into iPhones. Operating in 3GPP-standardized 5G NTN bands (Univity's choice) provides the cleanest interoperability with terrestrial 5G and the broadest device compatibility once NTN is widely supported in handsets, but requires per-country regulator approval for the satellite use of those bands.

Each path has its own time-to-revenue and total-addressable-market trade-off. The carrier-partnership path is fastest but most constrained. The MSS path is the most globally consistent but limited by handset support. The 5G NTN path is the most strategically aligned with where mobile networks are going but requires the longest regulatory runway. Univity is taking the long-runway path on the bet that its end-state is structurally better — and is using the demonstration phase, with CNES involvement, to compress the regulatory timeline.

Where European Entrants Fit

Univity is the first major European-headquartered, European-sovereign-capital-backed entrant in D2D, and it is positioning quite deliberately for the European telco market — a market that is fragmented enough, regulator-driven enough, and sovereignty-conscious enough that it has historically been a structurally different opportunity from the U.S. The entry of European operators with European capital backing creates an option for European telcos that did not previously exist: a wholesale satellite layer they can integrate without depending on U.S.-jurisdiction infrastructure. Whether European carriers actually back that option in commercial volume — and how Starlink, AST, Lynk, and the others respond to it — will be one of the defining stories of European satellite connectivity over the next 24 months.

Frequently Asked Questions