The satellite industry spends most of its time talking to itself. At SmallSat Europe, one of the people it will be talking to is a car company.
Olaf Eckart is a Senior Expert in Cooperations R&D at BMW Group, where he is a founding member of the company’s Non-Terrestrial Network team. For more than three years, he has led the NTN activities of the 5G Automotive Association, the cross-industry body where automakers, telecom operators, and satellite companies negotiate how satellite connectivity will reach the vehicle.
The work spans an ecosystem that few satellite conferences address from the demand side. BMW’s NTN team coordinates with chipset vendors, network operators, and satellite companies. Eckart’s role is translating what the automotive industry needs into specifications the satellite industry can build to.
The 5GAA published its NTN Roadmap in September 2024, a document Eckart helped shape that has become a reference for how the automotive and satellite sectors plan to converge. It maps deployment phases for narrowband, wideband, and broadband satellite data rates in vehicles, specifying antenna parameters and cost targets designed to make satellite links viable at automotive production volumes. The first mass-market NTN applications, narrowband IoT for emergency messaging and breakdown calls, are projected from 2027, built on the 3GPP Release 17 standard.
In May 2025, the roadmap became hardware. At a 5GAA demonstration in Paris, BMW and Viasat completed the first-ever satellite-connected vehicle demonstration in real-traffic conditions, proving that NTN could deliver hazard warnings and emergency messages with seamless handover between satellite and terrestrial networks. The broader 5GAA event also drew members and technology partners including Deutsche Telekom, Qualcomm, Skylo, and Stellantis.
The test answered a question the satellite industry has been asking for years: will automakers actually deploy satellite connectivity, or treat it as a niche backup? The evidence points to deployment. The NTN chipset market is scaling as 3GPP standardization drives new silicon for direct satellite-to-device links. Viasat’s industrial D2D report found in February 2026 that 91 percent of IoT decision-makers plan to adopt direct-to-device satellite connectivity within 18 months.
At SmallSat Europe, Eckart joins “Highway in the Sky: The Satellite Backbone for Seamless, Connected Cars” alongside Antonio Franchi, Head of Space for 5G and 6G Strategic Programme at the European Space Agency.
Most speakers at SmallSat Europe build satellites. Eckart builds the case for why cars should use them.
