NTN Can Solve Global Education Gaps

NTN or Non-Terrestrial Networks are communication networks that are either in space or in the sky.

Examples include: communication satellites, in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) & GEO (Geostationary Orbit) orbits, as well as HAPS (High Altitude Platforms).

These technologies have rapidly evolved in recent years, and are about to explode in one particular area.

Imagine a child in rural sub-Saharan Africa.

She is eleven years old, curious, and capable. But the nearest secondary school is forty kilometres away. There are no roads passable in the rainy season.

There is no bus.

There is no teacher willing to relocate to her village. And there is no internet connection — not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because no cable company has ever found it profitable to lay fibre to a community of three hundred people.

She is one of 273 million children worldwide who have no access to school.

That number doesn’t represent children in conflict zones alone, or children whose governments have failed spectacularly.

It represents a structural problem: the geography of poverty means the children who most need education are precisely the ones that terrestrial infrastructure will never reach economically.

No cable. No tower. No school.

Non-Terrestrial Networks — NTN — are about to change that calculation entirely.

What NTN actually means

NTN is the 3GPP term for communication networks that operate above the ground.

That covers three main categories: satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Geostationary Orbit (GEO), and High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) – solar-powered (though not always) aircraft or balloons operating at around 20km altitude.

Each has different characteristics. GEO satellites sit 35,786km above the equator and have been used for broadband and broadcast for decades, but the round-trip signal latency of around 600 milliseconds makes them poorly suited to interactive learning.

MEO satellites, like those used in GPS, sit at 2,000–20,000km.

LEO satellites operate at 500–2,000km, offering latency of 20–40 milliseconds, making them comparable to a good 4G connection, and it is LEO that is transforming what NTN can deliver.

HAPS platforms sit in the stratosphere, able to cover a region roughly 200km in diameter from a single unit.

Think of them as a cell tower floating above the clouds, persistent, solar-powered, and redeployable.

Together, these platforms form a layered architecture that can cover the entire surface of the Earth, including the 40% of it that has never had mobile coverage.

The shift that makes education delivery possible: direct-to-device

Until recently, NTN connectivity required specialist hardware, VSAT dishes, proprietary terminals, equipment costing thousands of pounds that needed trained installation and reliable power.

It was connectivity for oil rigs and research stations, not for children in rural classrooms.

3GPP Release 17, published in 2022, changed the architecture fundamentally.

For the first time, the standard included specifications for NTN integration with terrestrial 5G, meaning satellite connectivity could be delivered directly to a standard mobile device, with no specialist ground equipment required beyond the handset itself.

Release 17 was the specification. Release 18 and 19 extended it.

And companies like AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are now starting to operate commercial direct-to-device LEO satellite services, delivering broadband connectivity to unmodified smartphones, including mid-range Android devices that cost under £100.

The significance of that for education is difficult to overstate.

There are an estimated 4.5 billion smartphones in active use globally, including in low-income countries where feature phone replacement cycles have driven rapid smartphone penetration.

GSMA intelligence data consistently shows that device ownership runs ahead of connectivity in developing markets; people have the hardware, but no signal to connect it to. Direct-to-device LEO satellite connectivity closes exactly that gap, without requiring new infrastructure on the ground.

What education delivery via NTN actually looks like

The model I have been developing through ReachED is built around four components that work together: LEO direct-to-device connectivity, AI-powered personalised learning, repurposed smartphones, and locally cached content that reduces dependency on continuous uplink.

A child doesn’t need a permanent, always-on satellite connection to receive a good education.

She needs scheduled synchronisation, content pushed to her device during a daily or twice-daily satellite pass, AI-driven lesson sequencing that adapts to her pace offline, and periodic uplink of progress data for teacher oversight and credentialling.

This is not a simplified version of education.

The curriculum target is secondary-education-standard, the equivalent of what a child in a well-resourced urban school in England or Singapore would receive. The delivery mechanism is different. The standard is not.

The AI layer matters here more than the connectivity layer in some respects.

A child learning without a teacher present needs a system that can detect when she is struggling, reframe an explanation, offer a different analogy, and sequence the next concept only when the prior one is genuinely understood.

That is what modern small language model-based tutoring systems, deployed at the edge on a mid-range smartphone, can now do.

Why is the timing right now

Three things have converged in the past three years that make this genuinely deployable rather than theoretically interesting.

First, LEO constellation density. SpaceX Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, OneWeb and others have launched enough satellites that LEO coverage is now global or approaching it, with revisit times short enough to support the synchronisation model described above.

Second, the 3GPP NTN standard. Before Release 17, satellite connectivity required proprietary integration.

The standard means device manufacturers, network operators and satellite providers can now interoperate without bespoke engineering for every deployment.

Third, the cost curve on edge AI. Running a capable tutoring model on a device with 4GB of RAM and a mid-range processor was not practical in 2020. It is practical now, and the trajectory over the next three years makes it routine.

The infrastructure problem, the reason 273 million children have no school, has always been economic, not technical. The economics have now shifted.

The policy dimension

NTN for education is not purely a technology question. It sits at the intersection of spectrum policy, international development finance, device supply chains and curriculum standards, all of which require coordination across bodies including the ITU, UNICEF, the Global Partnership for Education, and national telecoms regulators.

Giga, the UNICEF and ITU joint initiative to connect every school to the internet, has mapped school connectivity across dozens of countries and built a data infrastructure that a deployment model like ReachED can complement directly. Partner2Connect, the ITU’s digital inclusion pledge mechanism, provides a formal pathway for committing connectivity capacity to underserved communities.

These frameworks exist precisely because the problem is understood at the policy level. What has been missing is a technically credible, deployable model that doesn’t depend on terrestrial infrastructure that will never arrive. NTN direct-to-device, combined with edge AI, provides that model.

What comes next

The ReachED Foundation is currently in Phase 1: entity registration, Partner2Connect pledge, and publication of a systems integration thesis establishing the technical and pedagogical architecture.

Phase 2 moves to pilot learning node design and country selection, identifying a deployment partner in a priority country with both a significant unreached child population and a regulatory environment supportive of NTN operations.

The Global Partnership for Education 2030 Summit represents a target milestone for demonstrating a working pilot and engaging corporate and development finance partners at scale.

If you work in satellite policy, international development, EdTech, or spectrum regulation and want to understand more about how NTN can be deployed for education access — or if you represent an organisation that could contribute connectivity capacity, devices, curriculum or funding — I would like to hear from you.

Get in touch here, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Craig Miles is a wireless communications engineer and educator with 30 years of experience spanning aerospace, LEO satellite systems and RF engineering. He is the founder of Yesway Communications and the ReachED Foundation, and spoke at TEDx Brayford Pool 2023 on satellite connectivity and the global education access gap.

What Is Direct-to-Device Satellite?