Satellites, Silicon & Supply Chains: Automotive’s New Reality from MWC 2026

Published: May 18, 2026 | By Stéphane Lagresle | Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling

At MWC Barcelona 2026, two shifts in the automotive industry became impossible to ignore: satellite connectivity for cars crossed from roadmap into working product, and the old OEM-Tier 1-Tier 2 waterfall model was declared functionally dead by the people who built it. Seven industry leaders — from PwC/Strategy&, 5GAA, Harman, MediaTek, SoundHound, Trustonic, and Salesforce — explain what changed, why it changed now, and what every player in the industry has 12 to 24 months to do about it.

Key Takeaways

• Non-terrestrial network (NTN) connectivity for vehicles moved from standards paper to functional product at MWC 2026 — BMW showed a roadmap, Harman demonstrated a working satellite SOS call, and MediaTek shipped the silicon.
• 5GAA’s CTO Maxime Flament reframes the challenge: the limiting factor was never the technology, it was building trust between industries that had never talked to each other before.
• The automotive supply chain is being “decomposed,” per PwC/Strategy& Partner Tanjeff Schadt — hardware and software are separating, and the slices of value are being redistributed.
• Semiconductor suppliers like MediaTek now have direct relationships with OEMs — an industry structure that would have been unusual five years ago.
• Whoever orchestrates the ecosystem — connecting agents, platforms, and services across companies — captures disproportionate value. Two different companies at MWC, Salesforce and SoundHound, both arrived at the same conclusion independently.

Why Did Automotive NTN Become Real at MWC 2026?

Non-terrestrial network connectivity for vehicles — NTN, or what most people simply call satellite connectivity for cars — has been discussed at industry events for several years. What made MWC 2026 different is that the supporting infrastructure arrived in the same building at the same time.

BMW unveiled a roadmap showing the transition from terrestrial-only to combined cellular-plus-satellite. Harman demonstrated a working SOS call made through a Viasat satellite connection inside an actual vehicle. MediaTek announced its latest 5G telematics chipset, built to the 3GPP Release 17 standard and software-upgradeable for what comes next. And 5GAA, the 5G Automotive Association, provided the standards framework that connects all these pieces.

Maxime Flament, CTO of 5GAA, explained the underlying logic concisely: cellular networks will never achieve 100% coverage everywhere cars drive. But the financial calculation is equally important. “There are obligations from mobile network operators to provide coverage in certain areas,” he told me. “Sometimes it’s more affordable to do that using a non-terrestrial network than to keep extending the terrestrial one — deploying cells in very low-demand areas where the only traffic is cars passing on a highway.”

The safety case is the forcing function. Firasat Siddiqui, Senior Director at Harman, put it plainly: “Imagine taking a ski trip through the Alps or Black Forest. You’re going to lose your cellular connection. God forbid somebody’s in a crash and they’re not able to send a notification — or the vehicle isn’t, because current vehicles work on the same cellular network as your mobile device. If you don’t have mobile coverage, you don’t have vehicle coverage either.”

On the Harman booth, that wasn’t a hypothetical. You could press an SOS button and watch it route a call through a satellite connection instead of a cell tower.

What Is Service Continuity — and Why Does It Matter More Than Backward Compatibility?

One of the more technically consequential conversations I had all week was with Flament about terminology — specifically, the difference between “backward compatibility” and “service continuity.”

BMW’s position, expressed in a keynote at MWC, was that 6G must be backward compatible with 5G because OEMs cannot afford to redesign connectivity mid-vehicle-lifecycle. Flament pushed back on the framing.

“Backward compatibility means you always have to implement what was done before — which freezes your implementation,” he explained. “Whereas service continuity means you can find new solutions to serve the same service. We’ve done this for years with 3GPP — voice has always been supported since 2G, but through different implementations. We’re making sure the services critical for automotive — especially safety services — can transition across different generations of radio technology over the next twenty years.”

Service continuity protects what the driver needs without locking the industry into how it’s delivered. That distinction matters for anyone planning long-cycle investments in connectivity infrastructure.

How Is the Automotive Supply Chain Being Restructured?

The second story running through MWC 2026 was less visible on the expo floor but came up in almost every conversation: the architecture of the industry itself is changing.

Tanjeff Schadt, Partner at Strategy& and EMEA Leader for Semiconductors, offered the clearest framework. “The car has become digital, data-driven, software-driven — a completely new architecture,” he said. “But nobody talks about this really anymore. At CES, at MWC — this is now reality. Software-defined, AI-defined. It’s happening.”

What’s replacing the old model, where an OEM sent a spec list down to Tier 1s who dealt with whatever Tier 2s they chose? Schadt described it as a decomposition. “It’s still the same cake, but the slicing is different. Hardware and software depend on each other but they’re separated topics. New domains.”

He outlined four possible futures depending on geography. In Europe, the most value is created if OEMs remain dominant but partner aggressively, absorbing capabilities they can’t build internally. In China, the trajectory is more disruptive — tech companies define the architecture and traditional players risk commoditization. The Waymo example represents the extreme: “As a car OEM in that scenario, you are fully commoditized. It’s just the four wheels from A to B. All the rest — the sensors, the full software stack, the training data — the value is captured by the tech player.”

Regardless of which scenario plays out in which region, one number stands out: the software and electronics content in the car is growing at double-digit rates even when global vehicle sales stay flat. Someone is going to capture that value. The question is who.

Why Are Semiconductor Companies Now Talking Directly to OEMs?

A concrete sign of the ecosystem restructuring: Weizhi Yu, VP of Automotive Product Marketing at MediaTek, described a direct-to-OEM relationship model that was essentially unheard of a decade ago.

Two forces are driving it. First, supply chain security — after the disruptions of the early 2020s, OEMs want shorter, more visible chains. “The car OEMs want to secure their end-user delivery, so they want to shorten the supply chain and make it more effective,” Yu explained.

Second, and less obvious: AI. “Large language models are changing every week. Some car makers want to develop their own differentiated apps based on new AI models. That’s only possible if they talk more directly with semiconductor partners.”

MediaTek’s position is built on technology commonality across sectors. The 5G modem architecture used in smartphones is not entirely different from the one in a telematics unit. The company ports its IP across form factors with automotive-specific modifications — higher temperature tolerance, robust design — rather than building from scratch. Yu uses the term “AI-defined vehicle” as the successor to “software-defined vehicle,” which signals what the next requirement wave will be for the silicon underneath.

Who Orchestrates the New Automotive Ecosystem?

If the old waterfall is over and the new model is a web of direct relationships, partnerships, and real-time integrations, a practical question follows: who coordinates it?

Two companies at MWC — one an enterprise CRM platform, one a voice AI company — gave strikingly similar answers from opposite ends of the stack.

Charlie Isaacs, CTO at Salesforce, described a vision he called the “large orchestration system.” The principle: specialized agents built by different companies — a parts agent, a dealer agent, a diagnostics agent — are only valuable if they’re accessible to the rest of the ecosystem. “A parts company might build the world’s best agent for finding the cheapest parts. That’s no good if nobody can access it. So if they register that agent in a system like MuleSoft Fabric, anyone connected to that fabric has an unfair advantage over anyone who isn’t.”

Salesforce’s automotive involvement is older than most people realize. In 2019, working with Harman, they connected a vehicle head unit to a Salesforce back end so salespeople could access their CRM from the car. From there, a prototype with Qualcomm automated the journey from check engine light to dealer appointment to parts order. The orchestration logic has only scaled since.

Andrew Richards, VP of Business Development at SoundHound, described the same principle from inside the vehicle cabin. “Our position has evolved. Even Apple is opening up so you can say ‘ask my car to ask Apple to do this.’ I’ll have my agent contact your agent. But as a user, you don’t have friction.”

SoundHound’s role, as Richards describes it, is to be the voice of the car brand itself — the brand-representing interface that then routes requests to whichever API, LLM, or external agent can answer them, using protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol) to manage the handoffs invisibly. “Calling different wake words is clunky,” he said. “That’s where we’re in a really good position.”

Two different business models, two different starting points, one converging insight: in the ecosystem era, whoever connects the dots captures the value.

What Role Does Security Play in an Open Automotive Ecosystem?

Andrew Till, General Manager of the Secure Platform division at Trustonic, raised a point that rarely gets enough attention in ecosystem discussions: openness creates security exposure, and the industry’s approach to that exposure has fundamentally changed.

“Security in automotive used to be through isolation,” Till explained. “Different network buses that didn’t talk to each other. CAN codes unique to every OEM, typically every model line. If I was a third party wanting to help you as an OEM, it was incredibly complex.” The software-defined vehicle required a different approach — common APIs, common policy management, common hardware and software building blocks.

The upside of that shift is speed. “Even six months before launch, you can still accommodate new concepts because you have an open architecture,” Till said. He cited Stellantis and Toyota as examples of major OEMs now joining standards bodies openly and publishing their requirements — a mindset shift that he described as significant.

Trustonic’s Kinibi Trusted Execution Environment is embedded in over two billion devices, giving the company a cross-sector view of how hardware-backed security scales — from mobile to automotive to IoT. The insight Till carried to MWC: the same security infrastructure that enables an open ecosystem also makes it trustworthy enough for safety-critical applications.

How Urgent Is the Window to Adapt?

If there was a single message that cut across every conversation at MWC 2026, it was timing. The ecosystem shift isn’t a slow-moving structural change that organizations can plan around over a five-year horizon.

Schadt was direct: “Within the next 12 to 24 months, you need to build up more capabilities. If you don’t have them, you will have a hard time to prevail — because you’re not in the driver’s seat. And one of the most important capabilities? The ability to play in an ecosystem. It’s not the typical ‘I’m the OEM, this is the supplier’ with traditional procurement behavior. That doesn’t work anymore. It’s much more collaborative, much more partnership-driven, on eye level.”

Isaacs framed it in terms of platform access: “Software is eating the world and AI is eating the software. It’s going to evolve into agent-to-agent operation — agents running in the vehicle, orchestration running in the cloud. The companies that connect their platform to that fabric early get an unfair advantage.”

Siddiqui, for his part, drew a structural parallel to the history of cellular networks. “Similar to how it started with 3G and 4G — the type of data available, what you could share — now most consumers stream 4K without hesitation. Eventually, satellite will get there too. It’s a process.”

The process is underway. The question is whether you’re building the capability to participate in it, or watching from the outside.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is NTN in the context of automotive connectivity?

NTN stands for Non-Terrestrial Network. In automotive, it refers to the use of satellite-based communication to complement cellular networks in areas where terrestrial coverage is absent or economically unviable. The 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) has published a roadmap for NTN adoption that aligns with satellite constellation availability and 3GPP standards, so no new chipset type is required in the vehicle.

Does satellite connectivity in cars require special hardware?

Not new chipset categories. 5GAA’s framework requires that NTN integration use the 5G standard as its core principle, meaning existing telematics architectures can accommodate satellite connectivity through software upgrades or compatible chipset generations. MediaTek’s Release 17-based chipset announced at MWC 2026 is designed with this forward compatibility in mind.

What is the difference between service continuity and backward compatibility for automotive connectivity?

Backward compatibility requires that every new technology generation support everything from previous generations, which constrains how the underlying system can be redesigned. Service continuity means that the services the driver depends on — particularly safety services — remain available across technology generations, even if the implementation changes entirely. 5GAA advocates for service continuity because it allows the industry to innovate the infrastructure without disrupting the end experience.

Why are OEMs now engaging directly with semiconductor companies?

Two reasons: supply chain resilience and AI differentiation. After supply chain disruptions earlier this decade, OEMs began shortening and simplifying their supplier relationships for critical components. Simultaneously, the complexity and speed of AI development in vehicles — new large language models shipping weekly — means OEMs need to work directly with chip suppliers to deploy differentiated software stacks faster than a multi-tier waterfall allows.

What is an automotive AI agent, and how does orchestration work?

An automotive AI agent is a software entity built around a specific capability — diagnosing a fault, finding parts, scheduling service, or answering driver questions — that can operate autonomously and communicate with other agents. Orchestration refers to the coordination layer that routes requests between these agents, either in the vehicle (via voice AI platforms like SoundHound) or in the cloud (via enterprise platforms like Salesforce’s MuleSoft Fabric). The competitive advantage goes to whoever sits at the orchestration layer.

Is Starlink an alternative to Viasat for automotive satellite connectivity?

Both are satellite providers that could theoretically serve automotive NTN use cases. Harman’s partnership at MWC 2026 was with Viasat specifically. The longer-term architecture, as described by both 5GAA and Harman, is one where vehicles roam between satellite providers similarly to how phones roam between cellular carriers — where the end user doesn’t choose, and the vehicle makes the connection automatically.

Episode Notes

This article draws on interviews recorded on the floor of MWC Barcelona 2026 for Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling, the episode titled “Barcelona Calling: When Satellites Met Ecosystems.”

Guests featured in this episode:

• Tanjeff Schadt — Partner, Strategy& (PwC), EMEA Leader Semiconductors | LinkedIn
• Maxime Flament — CTO, 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) | LinkedIn
• Firasat Siddiqui — Sr. Director Global Portfolio PMO, Harman International | LinkedIn
• Weizhi Yu — VP Automotive Product Marketing, MediaTek | LinkedIn
• Andrew Richards — VP Business Development, SoundHound AI | LinkedIn
• Andrew Till — General Manager Secure Platform, Trustonic | LinkedIn
• Charlie Isaacs — CTO for Customer Connection, Salesforce | LinkedIn

Listen to the full episode

Related Reading

• 5GAA Non-Terrestrial Networks Roadmap — the standards framework behind automotive satellite connectivity
• 3GPP NTN Technology Overview — how Release 17 integrates satellite communication into the 5G standard
• PwC: The Software-Defined Vehicle — research context for the ecosystem scenarios Tanjeff Schadt outlined
• SoundHound Automotive — the voice AI orchestration platform discussed by Andrew Richards
• Trustonic Automotive Security — hardware-backed security infrastructure for software-defined vehicles