From Masts to Orbits: The New Architecture of Presence

How satellite-to-smartphone connectivity is transforming telecom into a layer of national resilience

For more than a century, communication networks have been shaped by geography. Copper followed roads, fibre followed railways and mobile signals radiated outward from towers anchored to the ground. Connectivity meant coverage — a footprint on a map defined by infrastructure density and terrain. If you left the footprint, you left the network.

That logic is now dissolving. With regulators approving direct satellite-to-smartphone services, connectivity is no longer tied exclusively to terrestrial assets. A device in a remote valley, at sea or high in the mountains can remain connected without a single nearby base station. The network, in effect, no longer ends at the horizon.

“With satellite technology, people will in future be able to send selfies from Scafell Pike, livestream from Lake Windermere or hunt for bargains from Ben Nevis. This will connect remote and rural areas better than ever before, unlocking opportunities for communities, businesses and economic growth.”
David Willis, Group Director for Spectrum, Ofcom

At first glance, such statements frame the development as a quality-of-life improvement — better coverage for rural communities. Yet the deeper shift lies elsewhere. The transition is not from poor coverage to good coverage, but from coverage to continuity. Connectivity becomes an ambient condition rather than a service you actively seek.

Who Decides What the World Is Worth?

Why the Next Financial War Is Not About Capital — But About the Code That Defines It

If the first question was whether markets still create meaning, the deeper question now becomes: who designs the systems that assign meaning in the first place? They reflected industrial output, productivity gains, demographic shifts and technological innovation. Prices moved, bubbles formed, crashes corrected excess — but the underlying belief remained stable: markets discovered value.

That belief now looks increasingly outdated.

Today, valuation is no longer merely the outcome of aggregated human judgment. It is the product of layered infrastructures: data pipelines, AI-driven model architectures and standard-setting regimes that pre-structure what can be seen as risk, growth or sustainability. What appears on the exchange is the surface expression of a deeper computational order.

“Power is no longer about occupying territory, but about occupying the logic by which people understand their reality.”
— Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State

Though articulated in a geopolitical context, the observation captures the structural shift underway. Yet his observation captures the structural shift underway. If power increasingly resides in shaping the logic through which reality is interpreted, then modern financial systems are no longer neutral arenas. They are epistemic infrastructures. They do not just price the world; they define it.

In the 21st century, the market is no longer a mirror of the economy. It has become a lens — bending capital flows according to the architecture of its underlying models.

From Silicon to Light: Europe’s Photonic Sovereignty Moment

How initiatives like PIXSpain are rebuilding strategic autonomy at the physical layer of intelligence

For decades, digital power appeared to reside in software. Platforms, data and algorithms dominated economic narratives, while the physical foundations of computing faded into the background. Silicon Valley’s rise reinforced the idea that control over code — not factories — would determine the future.

Yet the AI era is quietly overturning that assumption. Training frontier models requires enormous amounts of hardware, energy and specialized chips. Cloud infrastructure has become less a virtual abstraction than a network of industrial facilities consuming electricity on the scale of small nations. The supposedly weightless digital economy turns out to be built on steel, silicon and rare materials.

This shift exposes a deeper vulnerability. Europe excels at research and regulation but depends heavily on external suppliers for advanced semiconductors and compute capacity. Without domestic infrastructure, even the most sophisticated European AI systems ultimately run on hardware designed, manufactured or operated elsewhere.

“The global race for leadership in chips is a reality and Europe must claim an active role. We have the talent and the research, but we lack the link to production and scaling.” Thierry Breton — Former European Commissioner for the Internal Market, European Commission

Breton’s warning reflects a growing recognition in Brussels that technological sovereignty cannot be achieved through software policy alone. It requires rebuilding the industrial base that underpins digital capabilities — a project now framed as essential to economic security, defense readiness and political autonomy.