SATELLITE 2021 Wrap-Up: Dreams in the Sky Need a New Reality on the Ground

SATELLITE 2021 came not a moment too soon. For the first time in its history, the show had an 18-month gap between events. From Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Enterprises announcing a groundbreaking deal between OneWeb and AT&T, to Sir Richard Branson talking about his space ambitions for Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic, the show had a bit of everything. One thing, however, that was prevalent throughout the week was discussion about the importance of ground segment technology and how there must be even greater collaboration not just between ground players and operators, but also between ground players themselves.

In the opening general session, Steve Collar, CEO of SES, said he believed the industry faces a number of challenges, despite the overall level of optimism in the industry. While he highlighted the fact, there is a lot of demand for satellite capacity, he said fulfilling this in a coherent way is a challenge. “We need to work together in a more collaborative way. Making networks virtualized and work more in the cloud for example. We will work with the likes of ST Engineering iDirect on this.” He joked that this could be a good topic for SATELLITE 2026.

Along this line, ST Engineering iDirect recently announced that it is part of a working group called Digital Interface Standards (DIS), calling for open standards between the satellite modem and the outdoor unit. Communications & Power Industries (CPI), Datum Systems, Gilat Satellite Networks, SES, Wavestream, and Data Path have joined the company in this effort.

On the same panel, Kevin Steen, CEO of ST Engineering iDirect, said the ground players such as ST Engineering iDirect need to be more open and more collaborative

“We must figure out the digital interface to make sure that you don’t block cloud enablement and delivering services and orchestration to the endpoint,” Steen said during the panel. “Yes, it’ll be an investment, yes it’ll change architecture, but you need to be part of it and adopt those standards so that you’re not proprietary and you can participate in a much larger ecosystem.”

Masterson and Halawi Talk Ground

Certainly, there seemed to be increased focus at SATELLITE 2021 on the ground side, perhaps compared to previous iterations of SATELLITE. In the run-up to the event, Via Satellite spoke to Intelsat Chief Commercial Officer, Samer Halawi, about how Intelsat views the ground side. He said while the ground players are improving, they are not there yet. Intelsat considers its technologies to be largely still proprietary, and the company still relies on hardware and getting servers and platforms in place.

“There is so much investment that goes into hardware, rather than the service behind it. What they need to do is take a leap of faith towards more common standards and one that brings us more into the mainstream telecoms world, rather than continuing to be a niche industry on the side. They need to move to a software-based, virtualized environment, with very little reliance on proprietary hardware,” he said.

In terms of user terminals, Halawi said the struggle of volume versus cost continues. Lower costs require higher volume, but volume has to be committed in order to lower costs. Until this cycle is broken, Halawi thinks the markets are not going to increase by the same magnitude than if prices were better.

“We are getting there, however. The drive towards 5G could be the thing that drives us to get to standardization on the ground,” he said.

OneWeb made many headlines at SATELLITE 2021, including distribution deals with AT&T and Hughes Network Systems. OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson talked with Via Satellite about ground segment technologies in a recent interview and believes open is better, and closed systems restrict customer choice.

“The more you open up customer choice, the better it is for everyone in the long-term, because you grow the size of the pie. I am a firm believer in the interoperability of technology,” he said.

Masterson said that when customers, vendors, and providers have invested very large amounts of capital in the systems they have, it does not change overnight. OneWeb is in a special position with its newness, to work with different providers.

“Because we are a new player we can work with as many players as we can. That is to the benefit of customers, but also to existing providers too,” Masterson said. “This is an important point, but we see ourselves as part of the solution, but we are not the solution. With others, we can provide an incredible solution to customers.”

Software-Defined and Virtualized Technology

There were also many panels at SATELLITE 2021 dedicated to the ground segment.

Sean Yarborough, vice president of Platforms and Product Management for ST Engineering iDirect joined the panel tackling “The Hidden Complexities of Ground Systems,” where the resounding message was that, despite the need for ground infrastructure to deal with more complex demands than ever before, the customers need simplicity and excellent performance.

Eutelsat’s Jon Sala commented that Dialog and MRC have major benefits of flexibility and scale for their B2B customers. Yarborough explained how virtualization and advances in Network Management Systems (NMS) allow ST Engineering iDirect to offer scalability while still delivering a seamless experience for all types of users.

“You'll see network virtualization becoming more the ground technology that we're using to accommodate a need for scale,” Yarborough said. “When you're talking about multi-orbit with different ground infrastructures, there is a need to stitch that together into a common end-to-end service. Enabling that through our NMS’s and API's delivers a lot of flexibility for service providers.”

In the panel “Reducing Infrastructure Costs in the New Space Supply Chain” – the future prospects of the ground segment were front and center of the discussion. One of the key speakers on the panel was Paul Mattear, principal business development manager for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Key themes like collaboration and interoperability emerged again. Mattear said it doesn’t matter how great a satellite is, if the ground infrastructure can’t support it. He believes that one of the issues with ground infrastructure is a lack of standards across the board.

“Software-defined systems — widely viewed as the future of the ground segment — require standards. If you're going to have partners develop those software-defined systems, there has to be a standard that they can develop them to,” he said.

Virtualization was also discussed. Stuart Daughtridge, vice president for advanced technology and business development at Kratos Defense and Security Solutions said digitization and virtualization — where hardware like modems, network switches, and signal processors are replaced with software — will also help with interoperability. “IP [Internet Protocol] data transport, by definition, is a dynamic service. To get the most value out of your network, when you have a dynamic traffic requirement, you have to have a dynamic network,” he added.

The Antenna Side

On Thursday the panel “Overcoming Design Constraints and Building the Perfect Low Cost Antenna” delved deep into the antenna side of things. The “perfect” antenna must be simple for the user, panelists said, so a perfect antenna could be fairly complex in design.

“It needs to be simple to manufacture, simple to calibrate and optimize,” said Ryan Jennings, senior manager for Satcom Strategy and Products for Ball Aerospace “When put in the field, it needs to be simple for people to use it and configure.”

Jennings said solutions are about more than the antenna. “It is a network now. It’s not just a point-to-point link. It’s much more complicated now with these managed network services. The network is constantly changing. Your antenna terminal has to function in that network, and the differences in that network are significant,” he said.

Meeting the Challenges Ahead

As Sunil Bharti Mittal said in his keynote, there is still a low percentage of people connected in developing countries. “The promise is to get low latency, high speed broadband services to them from a satellite. We believe we are here to solve the problem of worldwide connectivity,” he said. For this to happen, there needs to be a perfect marriage of space-based and ground-based technologies.

Satellite networks are getting more complex. More satellites are being launched. The industry wants to be part of a bigger, broader ecosystem. One example of this is the OneWeb and AT&T deal, showing satellite can serve the larger telco world.

The industry talks about a revolution in space, but it also needs to happen on the ground. Discussions at SATELLITE indicate an increased urgency here. The urgency to collaborate, put decades old thinking aside and work together. Companies like ST Engineering iDirect have been leading the charge with the “New Ground” initiative. Now is the time for the industry to deliver and bring these new uber flexible, interoperable ground systems to market. It is one of the biggest challenges these players have ever faced, but there is more investment and interest than ever before in this area.