Terravek is building an X-band downlink node at Svalgrund in Norrbotten. It will have two 7.3 m antennas and S-band TT&C, and it will be unstaffed and operated remotely from Toulouse.
The obvious question is why. Commercial ground station networks exist, they are good, and they are cheaper than capital expenditure on antennas in the Arctic Circle.
The answer is the tail of the latency distribution. Buying capacity gets you an excellent median and an unpredictable 95th percentile, because you are contending with everyone else's priority passes. For a customer running storm-surge alerting, the median does not matter. The bad day matters.
A high-latitude station also sees a polar-orbiting satellite on nearly every revolution, which is why Norrbotten and not somewhere more convenient.
Commissioning is planned for 2024. We will continue to use commercial capacity for the majority of passes — this is about controlling the worst case, not about vertical integration for its own sake.