There are many factors driving the ballooning complexity of ground systems, but paradoxically one of them is customer desire for simplicity, speakers said at SATELLITE 2021.
Jon Sala of Eutelsat said customers want simplified satellite services in a multi-orbit world. “How do we integrate multiple NMS technologies into something that’s simplified as a common portfolio for customers? How do we stitch together an ecosystem that can be accessed by customers on demand?” He acknowledged that satellite operators have lagged cloud providers by a decade and are now catching up.
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Channasandra Ravishankar of Hughes Network Systems said new HTS can handle 500 Gbps, creating technical challenges. “How do you push that many bits to the satellite over a limited amount of spectrum?” Higher frequencies like Q- and V-band reduce gateways needed but introduce weather-related availability challenges, requiring diversity gateways and intelligent rerouting algorithms. “You can imagine the devil is in the details.”
Ravishankar concluded: “At the end of the day, the quality of experience of the end user is paramount. Just because there’s rain, just because we’re using the band we are, we don’t want the end user to suffer.”
Samuel Peterson of Swedish Space Corporation noted Earth Observation data volumes have grown from gigabits to petabits per day — “two orders of magnitude more data.” Getting data from remote Arctic or desert ground stations into the terrestrial network is itself a challenge. More satellites also mean more spectrum coordination: “We have to coordinate with other operators a lot more to mitigate and make sure that the spectrum can be used efficiently by everybody.” VS
