As president and chief executive officer (CEO), Ian Canning is responsible for furthering the combined Eutelsat America Corp. and OneWeb Technologies Inc. (EACOWT) vision of providing global satellite connectivity, innovative solutions and exceptional support focused on meeting the mission requirements of the U.S. government.
Ian brings a wealth of multinational leadership experience and a proven track record in driving strategic growth, operational excellence and commercial success within the global satellite communications (SATCOM) and telecommunications industries. Ian initially joined Trustcomm as chief operating officer in 2012, playing a key role in its growth from a small service provider to a leading player in the industry. He was instrumental in Trustcomm’s successful acquisition by OneWeb and its subsequent transformation into OneWeb Technologies, the U.S. proxy of OneWeb. His leadership was pivotal later in helping to achieve its merger with Eutelsat America Corp. He assumed the role of president and CEO in January 2025.
Prior to Trustcomm, he led global product innovation and marketing at Stratos Global Corp. where he was responsible for the company’s global product and marketing portfolio. At Iridium Satellite LLC, he led sales for Europe and the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and leveraged personal relationships to establish key partnerships for the business. Prior to that, he held leadership positions driving commercial initiatives, sales and business development within global leaders Inmarsat, Nortel and Motorola. Ian holds a master’s degree in business administration from Greenwich School of Management in London.
Good day, Mr. Canning. As you have take the helm as president and CEO of Eutelsat America Corp. and OneWeb Technologies Inc (EACOWT), what are your immediate priorities for the combined organization?
Ian Canning
Ian Canning
Our focus, as you would imagine, is the customer and making certain we continue to deliver on our differentiated solutions effectively and efficiently. Maintaining the “customer first” commitment through all our customer interface teams (sales, sales engineering, operations, engineering, etc.) is foundational to our corporate mentality. To achieve this, we have been focused on stability of the organization, and on continuing to integrate the skills and knowledge of the combined group. I am very fortunate to work with such a talented and dedicated group of professionals.
America Corp. (EAC) and OneWeb Technologies (OWT) brought together impressive GEO and LEO capabilities. How does this integration uniquely benefit your government customers and what opportunities does it create for innovation and growth?
Ian Canning
As the only operator that has assets in both GEO and LEO orbits, it gives us a unique insight into user applications of the various solutions.
We’re leveraging that knowledge and experience to bring forward the most optimal solution for specific use cases, especially within the Government sector.
The merger has also bought together our go-to-market strategy, as well. Our Partners are key to adding value to our core GEO and LEO solutions, but it is also imperative that we maintain direct access to the user to be able to represent our unique capabilities.
As we look forward, expect our innovation to be focused on how we can effectively package and deliver the combination of GEO and LEO, leveraging some of the latest orchestration capabilities (either hardware or software). We have recently entered a development to enable interaction between our GEO capacity management capabilities and the United States Government’s (USG)’s preferred orchestration platform.
Please tell the readers what are the most significant trends you foresee shaping the SATCOM landscape in the coming year, and how is EACOWT preparing to help enable them?
Ian Canning
The COMSATCOM industry has fundamentally changed over the past 24- to 6 months with the introduction of new, not traditional competitors. This has forced the space sector to review its approach to business and to be clearer about its value proposition.
EACOWT is focused on delivering flexible, adaptable and highly- available end-to-end critical communications for the USG and its allies. This requires fully understanding the satellite element of delivery as well as also integrating with the terrestrial networks.
It also demands the highest standards of cyber security to meet the increasingly stringent requirements of government and corporate network environments. Being able to seamlessly integrate into the user’s environment, whether that’s orchestration, IP network, terrestrial, security expectations and deliver full transparency of that capability is vital. It always sounds simple but the implementation across the organization, to deliver on these commitments, relies on having an in-depth strength within and across the team—which we are fortunate to have.
EACOWT recently introduced a packaged positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) solution designed for environments where GPS/GNSS is unavailable. Could you share more about this technology and its potential impact on government operations reliant on resilient navigation solutions?
Ian Canning
Alternate sources of Position Navigation and Timing (A-PNT) have been identified as an absolute necessity to support many elements of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), not limited to, but including communications.
Due to the complex nature of our network environment, timing is key, so we undertook an initiative as EACOWT, aligned with the Group, to do an initial Assessment of Alternatives that led to a development of AstraPNT.
AstraPNT enables us to take all Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) feeds, GPS plus Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou, along with the Iridium STL service, to provide a consistent, easily digestible, GPS L1 feed for ingestion into systems requiring a resilient timing.
In addition, working with our partner Viavi, AstraPNT includes a holdover capability that, should the GNSS feeds, including Iridium, enter into a jammed environment, we then provide a four hour holdover capability.
The capability has proven itself to be highly resilient in extremely challenged environments, including the recent U.S. SOCOM Artic Warrior technical experiment exercise.
Would you provide insights into recent collaborations and how they support the U.S. government’s mission-critical connectivity needs?
Ian Canning
Collaboration underpins our go-to-market strategy in support of the U.S. government. EACOWT have an extensive partnerships with key industry players (in no particular order), such as SES-GS, Viasat, Ultisat, Intelsat, Hughes, who have long standing relationships with the USG customer and also have value-add capabilities they add to our offerings to further differentiate the overall proposition.
User terminals are also a key enabler to our ability to deliver so we work incredibly closely with the likes of Kymeta, Intellian, Hughes and others to deliver terminals tailored to meet USG needs. The combination of the EACOWT partnership meets, and in many cases exceeds, the mission critical and Primary, Alternative, Contingency and Emergency (PACE) needs of our community, not to mention the AstraPNT relationships with Iridium and Viavi.
Eutelsat is set to introduce its Flexsat solution in the next year or so – how does EACOWT plan to implement those capabilities and how will that benefit your government customers?
Ian Canning
As Eutelsat Group adds incremental capability and capacity into the overall fleet of GEO and LEO, EACOWT plays a key role in working with the Group to ensure core U.S. government needs are understood within the requirement definition phase and then available to the USG through delivery.
EACOWT represents all the Group’s capability, FLEXSAT specifically offers a highly flexible and adaptable platform allowing us to be adaptable to government requirements taking advantage of its High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity along with the software definition if the satellite payload. This flexibility and adaptability on capabilities is exactly what the Government is demanding going forward.
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