[1] Customers with their own installations include the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The facility has seen a large increase in smaller customers after 2004, when the Svalbard Undersea Cable System started providing a fiber Internet connection.

[8] Svalbard was chosen because of its high latitude from which every polar-orbiting satellite above 500 kilometers (310 mi) can be seen on every revolution as the earth rotates within its orbital plane.

For the EOS program, Svalbard was supplemented by Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Construction of the road up to Platåberget started in 1996 and a relay station was built to send the data to Isfjord Radio before being sent onwards to a geostationary satellite.

Instead, a cooperation was made with Kongsberg Aerospace and Defence and Lockheed Martin, who built the second antenna as a joint venture.

[10] Northrop Grumman and Raytheon decided in 2002 to locate its ground station for National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, the successor of EOS, to Helsinki, Finland, instead of Svalbard.

NSC took initiative to build such a cable in July 2002 and gained interest from NASA, NOAA and Telenor.

A 40 million United States dollar contract was signed with Tyco International for two cables between Harstad on the mainland and Longyearbyen.

[17] In his 2011 book Satellittkrigen, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Bård Wormdal argues that SvalSat is used for military intelligence and thus is violating the Svalbard Treaty.

Specifically, Wormdal provides evidence that downloaded images of the earth are used for intelligence and military activities.

[18] According to Governor Odd Olsen Ingerø, even if a military should indirectly use information downloaded from SvalSat, this would not be a breach of the treaty.

[20] On January 7, 2022, an undersea fiberoptic cable located between the Svalbard Satellite Station and the Norwegian mainland was cut and put out of operation in mysterious incident.

The official press release from Space Norway said the extent of the damage was not clear and will require a cable-laying ship to investigate and repair.

Some customers have direct access to their installations in Longyearbyen without having to route via the Tromsø Network Operation Center.

The facility uses interoperability and shared ground services, such as a common protocol for communication and similar design of the antennas, to increase flexibility and reduce costs and risk.

[10] KSAT operates two polar ground stations optimized for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, the other being TrollSat at Troll in Antarctica.

[25] SvalSat is located on Platåberget, a mountain plateau 400 to 500 meters (1,300 to 1,600 ft) above mean sea level just outside Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway.

2019), both multi-mission and customer dedicated, making SvalSat the world's largest commercial ground station.

From 2004, the Svalbard Undersea Cable System gives two redundant fiber lines to the mainland, each providing 10 gigabits per second.

This includes support for the Earth Observing System, which includes satellites such as Aqua, Aura, Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, and QuikSCAT, as well as the Small Explorer program which includes Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite, Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, and Transition Region and Coronal Explorer.