GSOA and Partners Unlock Future Opportunities for Satellite in the 3GPP Standards Ecosystem

The satellite industry is always looking for new markets — how to increase the addressable market, and bring satellite services to news industries and customers. The 2023 Satellite Technology of the Year winner was recognized for unlocking a new greenfield of opportunity — mobile phones and devices.

While the satellite and mobile industries have historically operated in their own independent siloes, a group of satellite and mobile industry professionals representing multiple companies and organizations have been working behind the scenes for years to bring satellite into mobile standards. Their work, which spanned over Release 15, 16, and 17, came to fruition in 2022, when the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) included the necessary enablers for the support of non-terrestrial networks (NTN) in the Release 17 set of specifications.

The Global Satellite Operators Association (GSOA) played a central role as a partner of 3GPP to make this happen. The award also recognizes the joint work between satellite and mobile organizations as well as the individuals that contributed to this effort. Among the satellite organizations, the early promoters were EchoStar, Thales, the European Space Agency (ESA), Inmarsat, Intelsat, Eutelsat, and Sateliot. Individuals include Munira Jaffar of EchoStar; Nicolas Chuberre, Dorin Panaitopol, Mohamed El Jaafari, Jean-Yves Fines of Thales, Stefano Cioni of ESA, and Gilles Charbit of MediaTeK.

“This is really the result of a lot of hard work and dedication from many players in the satellite industry,” GSOA Director General Isabelle Mauro tells Via Satellite. “Now, we are really part of 3GPP. We are invited, we have a voice. Everybody wants to listen to [our] input.”

Gaining Consensus Behind the Scenes

Munira Jaffar, director of Spectrum and Standards for EchoStar, and chair of the GSOA Standards Working Group, recounts the early days of the effort, when EchoStar and Thales Alenia Space were involved as part of the satellite standard interest group supported by the European Space Agency.

The very first meeting gathering both mobile and space industry stakeholders was organized by Thales and Hughes/EchoStar as an offline session in 2017.

Jaffar said it was challenging to gain the acceptance of the mobile industry in the beginning, but the group was persistent in convincing the mobile standards committee of the benefit of including satellite.

“That's when we started to work and collaborate with the mobile industry vendors to help them get more interested and see this as an opportunity versus competition,” Jaffar says. “Mobile operators were initially very skeptical.” She said initial interest came from vendors like Ericsson, Qualcomm, Nokia, MediaTek, Samsung, and a few others.

The mobile industry questioned whether the technical constraints could be adapted into the standards, but also had concerns about what it would mean competitively if satellite was part of the ecosystem.

She recounted that a member of 3GPP leadership attended a GSOA board meeting to tell the satellite industry it needed to get more companies involved and take a more unified approach in order to realize this opportunity. This led to the standards working group within GSOA and GSOA became a market representation partner of 3GPP. The working group succeeded in getting satellite more involved in 3GPP.

Nicolas Chuberre, solution line manager for Thales Alenia Space, has been involved in this work of integrating satellite and mobile industries since the days of 3G.

“At that time, nobody believed that there would be enough interest within the mobile ecosystem to support this integration of satellite in the mobile ecosystem,” Chuberre said. “But that was made possible with Release 17. It is quite an achievement. Not many people grasp yet all the impact it's going to have on the satellite communication industry, but also on the mobile industry overall.”

He said that while in the past there were technical challenges, one of the key things was being able to approach the standard leveraging the mobile industry’s specifications and taking into account the constraints of terminal/chipset/network vendors.

“The 3GPP NTN standard is the result of a true joint work between space industry players together with the chipset vendors, the terminal vendors, the network vendors, and some mobile network operators,” Chuberre says. “This standard achieves the best performance among all the other options that we initially had envisaged.”

Standard Opens Up New Possibilities

The standards enable full interoperability between satellite and terrestrial, including mobility procedures across both network components, allowing mass-market smartphones and IoT devices to connect seamlessly with both terrestrial mobile networks and NTN-based satellite networks when out of range of terrestrial connectivity.

After years of work, Jaffar believes the inclusion in 3GPP has changed the relationship between the satellite and mobile industry.

“Right now we have tremendous support from the mobile industry in terms of accepting satellite to be a true solution for rural unserved and underserved areas, and also important for critical communications, such as public safety, and emergency communication,” Jaffar said.

Jaffar predicts that moving forward, every mobile network operator will have a partnership with a satellite operator in order to leverage these capabilities to expand their networks. At the same time, the standards have sparked greater interest from the mobile industry and other industries like automotive and agriculture.

“Having a common standard with the mobile industry is a great beginning. It will push the conversation between satellite and cellular technologies for better connectivity. There are going to be more innovative designs with NTN in the 3GPP ecosystem, we continue to evolve in release 18,” Jaffar says. “It will open up new opportunities, new use cases, even new business models and opportunities for both satellite and terrestrial.”

At SATELLITE 2024 in March, International Telecommunication Union General Secretary Doreen Bogdan-Martin urged the satellite industry to work with the mobile industry to support the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda and efforts to connect the third of humanity, overwhelmingly poor and rural, who are still offline.

Mauro believes that the convergence of the mobile and the satellite industry will help connect the 2.6 billion people who are still not online.

“We know that the optimum solution is going to be a mix of technologies. If there had been a miracle solution, these 2.6 billion would be online — whether by satellite or by terrestrial,” Mauro says. “Clearly on our own, we haven't been able to do it. It’s by bringing this mix of technologies together that we can pool their different strengths. We can increase the cost efficiencies, build economies of scale, and deliver greater resilience and greater coverage.”

“It will also help connect rural and remote areas, and will really bring equal opportunities and help bridge the digital divide not only for citizens, but also for enterprises and entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia,” she adds.

Before GSOA, Mauro previously worked for GSMA, which supports the interests of the mobile operators. GSMA estimates that innovations in satellite can bring an additional $30 billion to $35 billion in income to the industry by 2035.

Collaboration is moving forward, and GSOA is working with ESA and GSMA to strengthen partnerships between mobile and satellite industries to collaborate on technologies that bring the two solutions together, and integrating satellite communications with 5G and future 6G networks.

“Coming from the mobile industry and now being in the satellite industry, I couldn't be more chuffed about this cooperation with GSMA and ESA,” Mauro says. “All of those are signs of really how things have changed from two industries that used to work in isolation and are now being brought together.”

Mauro points to the economies of scale that can be achieved only working with the mobile industry. The mobile industry needs the universal coverage of satellite to expand its networks, and the satellite industry needs the economies of scale of the mobile industry.

“Economies of scale can only be achieved if we work together, and we combine our strengths,” Mauro says. “At the end of the day, the consumer doesn't care, doesn't know, and shouldn't know whether they are connected by satellite or by terrestrial. All you want is good coverage at a good price and to have coverage everywhere as a baseline. It’s in our interest to all work together to deliver that.”

Evolving the Standard in the Future

While Release 17 was the first standard to include NTN compatibility, this is just the start of how satellite will be integrated into the mobile ecosystem moving forward. Standard releases work three years ahead, so Jaffar said work is wrapping up on Release 18, and there are already discussions underway for Releases 19 and 20.

Jaffar said Release 18 will improve the coverage in terms of better connectivity between the satellite and the mobile device, both on the uplink and also on the downlink. It will also improve the mobility aspect between non-terrestrial and terrestrial networks, allowing for smoother, quicker handovers. Release 18 will also introduce Ka-band to allow for connectivity between VSAT terminals.

While mobile network operators are still rolling out 5G networks, discussions are underway about 6G. Both Mauro and Jaffar emphasize that satellite will have a larger role to play in 6G because NTN is now fully part of the 5G standards ecosystem and will be integrated into 6G from the onset.

Jaffar says that 6G will likely have more capacity and more features for artificial intelligence, machine learning, public safety, emergency communication, and mass communication.

In November 2023 at WRC-23, the International Telecommunication Union’s Radiocommunication sector (ITU-R) agreed on a global vision for 6G, also referred to as IMT-2030. The IMT-2030 Framework Recommendation identifies 15 capabilities for 6G technology, nine of which come from existing 5G systems.

For example, some of the expected usage scenarios seem to point to satellite — including hyper-reliable and low-latency communication for intelligent industrial applications like telemedicine and managing energy and power grids, and ubiquitous connectivity, especially in rural, remote and sparsely populated areas.

The integration will enable GSOA members to bring many more opportunities to the B2B or B2C market, and global education, Mauro says. “They're going to offer endless opportunities to transport, navigation, maritime, land, healthcare, and the energy sector. It’s no longer just broadband and comms — it's really opened vast opportunities across the digitalization of other industries.”

Mauro describes the evolution of satellite and mobile standards that satellite was “interworked” with 4G, “integrated” with 5G, and will now be “unified” with 6G. “We [will] really come together from the beginning,” she says. “We will be part of the definition from the beginning — not just an add-on as it was for 5G.”

People like to talk about the “killer app” that is so innovative and necessary that it becomes the defining example of a technology. Mauro believes that NTN will enable the killer app for 6G.

“I think that 6G will have a killer app which will only be enabled by a combination of satellite and terrestrial,” she says. “That’s what will make it an incredible success because it will bring ubiquity, continuity, scalability and resilience all together.”

While in the past, satellite was limited to proprietary technology, the NTN standard allows the industry to be part of the conversation from the start.

“Satellite is crucial in expanding coverage, global connectivity, filling up the gaps of areas where it’s not cost effective to deliver terrestrial,” Jaffar says, adding these standards are a “very important contribution to the overall global connectivity and enhancing the reliability and resiliency of connectivity as a whole.” VS