Open Standards API automation for SATCOM and terrestrial network services – powered by nBrace™
An industry-backed solution that enables CSPs to seamlessly order, manage, and integrate satellite services alongside terrestrial networks. Reduce integration complexity, streamline fulfilment, and scale your SATCOM services to new markets.
At Amartus, we’ve built a long-standing track record of shaping industry standards that make it easier for service providers to work together, automate operations, and integrate new services faster.
For over a decade, we’ve been active contributors to MEF (now Mplify), playing a key role in defining APIs for standardized, automated connectivity between consumers & suppliers. Our work has been consistently recognized with multiple Mplify Showcase awards for technical innovation and practical implementation.
Expanding impact through TM Forum
We’ve extended this engagement to TM Forum, contributing to the evolution of its business and operational frameworks. Our focus has been on enabling open, model-driven service management architectures that support CSPs in scaling and transforming their internal operations.
A core part of this work is our participation in TM Forum Catalyst projects—practical, collaborative initiatives where CSPs, vendors, and technology partners co-develop working prototypes using TM Forum Open APIs and the Open Digital Architecture (ODA). These engagements drive practical advancement of Open Standards, helping to close the gap between vision and implementation—for both terrestrial and satellite-based service ecosystems.
Our TM Forum Catalyst contributions
Amartus has contributed to several Catalyst phases over several years, bringing our nBrace™ orchestration platform and domain expertise to two strategic efforts:
SATCOM Catalyst – tackling a critical challenge for the satellite industry: enabling scalable, standardized satellite services that CSPs can compose, order, and manage like any telecom offering.
- Wholesale Broadband – focused on building an automated, standards-based framework for wholesale service interoperability, dynamic ordering, and provisioning across multiple operators. Read more about it here.
Phases of the TM Forum Catalyst SATCOM (2023-2025)
The TM Forum SATCOM Catalyst is a joint effort by satellite operators, CSPs, and solution providers who’ve collaborated over three years to develop the project across three focused stages. Together, they lay the foundation for SATCOM-as-a-Service to become a mainstream part of the telecom service mix—interoperable, on-demand, and orchestrated at scale:
- Phase I – Open SATCOM Management (2023): Defined standardized, multi-orbit satellite connectivity products and enabled end-to-end orchestration using TM Forum and Mplify APIs.
- Phase II – SATCOM + 5G = Anywhere (2024): Integrated satellite services with 5G infrastructure to support hybrid connectivity and enable seamless operation across terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks.
- Phase III – SATCOM with an Edge (2025): Added edge compute capabilities at satellite gateways, orchestrated via ODA, to support low-latency, high-value services in remote and mission-critical environments.
Allowing seamless ordering, activation, and management of SATCOM services across providers
Phase I of the Open SATCOM Management Catalyst focused on productising flexible satellite connectivity offerings—demonstrating how CSPs can dynamically configure bandwidth, bundle multi-orbit capacity, and integrate value-added services from across the satellite and telecom ecosystem.
In this initial phase, eight participants—including four major satellite operators and four vendors—collaborated to:
Define and standardize satellite connectivity products across vendors and orbits.
Align product ordering and service orchestration flows using TM Forum Open APIs and Mplify LSO Sonata.
Showcase how CSPs can easily integrate satellite offerings into their service portfolios, enabling a wide range of use cases from remote connectivity and disaster backup to event-based bandwidth provisioning.
Benefits for satellite operators and CSPs
- Customer-centric delivery: The Catalyst combats the traditionally fragmented customer experience of satellite services by introducing telecom-grade productization and seamless integration into CSP systems.
- Faster time to market: By using common APIs and orchestration frameworks, new services can be provisioned and scaled across consumers & suppliers and geographies with minimal customization.
- Revenue growth enablement: The solution opens up new revenue opportunities for CSPs and satellite operators alike in the booming SATCOM market, projected to exceed $74 billion by 2031.
The Open SATCOM Management Catalyst – Phase I offers a pioneering approach to unifying the SATCOM and telecom ecosystems. By extending TM Forum and Mplify standards, the project demonstrates a viable framework for offering SATCOM-as-a-Service, with fully interoperable, telco-integrated capabilities. This initiative lays a strong foundation for future phases that will deepen orchestration, assurance, and monetization—ultimately enabling frictionless satellite connectivity at scale.
TM Forum Catalyst: Towards a standardized, productized satellite model
- Composite service design demonstrated how multi-vendor, multi-orbit SATCOM services can be composed into standardized products, using TMF620 (Product Catalogue), TMF622 (Product Order), and other key APIs.
- Orchestration across domains from Amartus (nBrace™ orchestration engine) enabled decomposition and fulfilment of multi-provider product orders, integrating with Mplify LSO Sonata for inter-party coordination and with TMF APIs for internal system harmonization.
- Interoperability Across LEO/MEO/GEO: Extended ODA principles were applied to ensure seamless communication between different orbital network domains and underlying orchestration stacks, enabling automated provisioning and assurance.
- Foundation for Future Phases: The Catalyst set the stage for enhanced service orchestration, SLA management, and dynamic bandwidth allocation in future iterations, anchoring satellite services within the digital-first telecom ecosystem.
Offering SATCOM + 5G anytime, anywhere for on-demand emergency access
When an earthquake strikes, a tsunami surges ashore, or wildfires ravage remote regions, the ability to restore connectivity within minutes can be the difference between a life-saving emergency response and a complete operational breakdown. In many of these situations, ground-based telecom infrastructure, such as fiber lines, power grids, and mobile towers, is either damaged beyond use or inaccessible for repair.
For satellite service providers, these moments are not just a humanitarian imperative but also a critical test of readiness. Satellite connectivity is often the only viable solution, whether enabling mobile communication hubs, supporting temporary LTE/5G cells, or providing resilient backhaul for emergency networks. Yet today, delivering SATCOM services quickly and reliably is often constrained by the lack of common service definitions, fragmented integration, and manual provisioning.
The award-winning Phase II of the Open SATCOM Management Catalyst directly addresses these challenges.
By establishing a standardized, multi-orbit SATCOM product and service model and enabling automated, multi-provider orchestration through TM Forum Open APIs and Mplify Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO), the Catalyst empowers satellite providers to integrate more seamlessly with CSPs.
With orchestration driven by the nBrace™ platform, satellite operators can offer pre-defined, on-demand connectivity packages that are ready for rapid deployment, supporting disaster response, resilience planning, and other mission-critical use cases where time, trust, and scale are everything.
TM Forum Catalyst: Elevating comms for global resilience & commercial success
Operationalising SATCOM + 5G to empower relief agencies with resilient communications to save lives
Automated, AI-enhanced marketplace-based Intent-Order-Activate process with multi-domain service orchestration across SATCOM and 5G
Using TMF Open Digital Architecture (ODA) framework to facilitate interoperability and standardization
- Inclusion of the following TMF standards to enhance the Phase I solution:
- TMF620 – Product Catalog Management API, used to define and expose standardized SATCOM service products, such as multi-orbit connectivity bundles, to be integrated into CSP and partner offerings.
- TMF633 – Service Catalog Management API, defining the technical building blocks of SATCOM services to be reused and combined consistently during orchestration.
- TMF637 – Product Ordering API, facilitating the placement and tracking of orders for commercial product offerings.
- TMF638 – Service Inventory Management API for tracking the real-time status of satellite service deployments across LEO, MEO, and GEO.
- TMF640 – Service Activation and Configuration API, translating product orders into technical configurations across multiple satellite and CSP domains to orchestrate the activation of SATCOM links and service paths.
- TMF641 – Service Ordering API, coordinating the fulfilment of complex SATCOM services (e.g., bandwidth, latency guarantees, link availability) at the network layer, enabling intent-based provisioning and multi-orbit orchestration.
Integrating AI-powered orchestration, digital twin intelligence, and multi-orbit settlement to deliver mission-ready satellite-5G services
Phase III of the SATCOM Catalyst—”SATCOM with an Edge”—took a major leap forward in demonstrating how 5G networks and satellite connectivity can work together to deliver resilient, on-demand services in mission-critical scenarios. This phase focused on service fulfilment, assurance, and monetization across integrated 5G and SATCOM domains, with the added complexity of autonomous operations, multi-orbit optimization (GEO/MEO/LEO), and automated settlement workflows.
Building on the previous two Catalysts, this phase makes a significant progress, delivering a few innovative use cases thanks to the integration of AI agents, SD-WAN traffic routing, and digital twins. These use cases include:
Autonomous Networks & Closed-Loop Assurance. Autonomous fault detection and SLA-driven remediation across multi-orbit SATCOM and 5G infrastructure.
- AI-Assisted Order Management & Service Fulfilment (with Digital Twin). End-users describe service needs in natural language; GenAI maps them to technical specs and triggers cross-domain fulfilment across CSP and satellite networks.
Service Monetization & Settlement. Real-time, unified billing and inter-provider settlement leveraging TM Forum APIs and an automated mediation layer.
Phase III refined and extended the groundwork laid in earlier phases by layering service assurance, monetization, and intelligent orchestration onto the standardized, multi-orbit SATCOM product and service model defined previously.
While Phase I focused on the standardization and initial order orchestration, and Phase II introduced resilient, deployable SATCOM-5G bundles for emergency response, Phase III added 27 ODA components, 18 TM Forum Open APIs, and breakthrough technologies like Digital Twin modelling, AI service agents, and automated billing mediation—pushing the solution closer to a real-world, production-ready architecture for global 5G-SATCOM integration.
Benefits for satellite operators and CSPs
AI-driven, agentic service ordering & fulfilment: Natural-language requests translated to service specification via GenAI agents.
Mission-critical connectivity: Dynamically provisioned 5G cells with SATCOM backhaul for field ops, public safety, and disaster response.
Unified assurance & SLA management: Single view across satellite and terrestrial domains via TMF APIs and Digital Twin insights.
Autonomous network operation: Optimized use of orbits and resources through intent-driven orchestration and closed-loop automation.
Seamless partner billing & settlement: Automated charging, entitlement, and settlement flows across multi-provider, multi-orbit value chains.
TM Forum Catalyst: SATCOM services with an Edge
- TMF623 – Service Qualification API, establishing the feasibility of a composite SATCOM + 5G service in a given location or configuration settings.
- TMF628 – Performance Management API, supporting real-time monitoring of service KPIs such as bandwidth, latency, and jitter across GEO, MEO, LEO and 5G segments, vital for enforcing and assuring SLAs.
- TMF639 – Resource Inventory Management API, providing a unified, live inventory of physical and virtual resources — such as satellites, ground stations, RAN elements, and network slices and acting as the foundational layer in the Catalyst’s digital twin.
- TMF648 – Billing Account Management API, used to manage billing profiles for enterprise or public sector customers ordering integrated SATCOM-5G services.
- .TMF649 – Party Management API, which coordinates data on all commercial entities involved in service deliveryfor consistent identities and clear roles across ordering, fulfilment, and settlement flows.
- TMF678 – Customer Bill Management API, exposing detailed billing statements and usage data to end customers.
- TMF679 – Settlement Management API, central to the Catalyst’s monetization use case, it automates financial settlement between CSPs and satellite providers based on usage, entitlements, and pricing rules.
- TMF727 – Product Inventory Management API, which tracks the catalogue and lifecycle of SATCOM-5G product instances purchased and consumed, essential to ensure that services were accurately reflected during assurance and billing in the autonomous scenario.
- TMF771 – Service Test Management API, used to trigger and manage tests on SATCOM and 5G service paths before or after activation.
- TMFC017 – Resource Function Activation & Configuration, which is part of ODA that activates network functions across satellite and terrestrial domains, enabling on-demand service creation with minimal human intervention.
TM Forum SATCOM Catalyst library of resources
Here, you will find all the resources documenting our TM Forum Catalyst work around the Open SATCOM Management project.
Open SATCOM management
SATCOM + 5G anywhere – Phase II
- Catalyst intro video
- Inform Catalyst overview: Creating opportunities while saving lives through 5G-NTN
- TM Forum Catalyst official site for Phase II
- Solution video: nBrace™ SATCOM services orchestration
SATCOM with an Edge – Phase III
Turn SATCOM showcase into repeat business
Discover how the nBrace™ orchestrator powers automated satellite service delivery—streamlining operations and accelerating growth. Connect with our expert team to discuss your standards-based implementation, or learn about other proven use cases in wholesale broadband services.