How Ground Tech Providers are Adapting to Virtualization and Constellations

As satellite operators have wrestled with the commoditization of bandwidth, they’ve sought to expand their offerings down the value chain, wrapping the connectivity they sell in value-added services designed to make it more attractive. A similar process is now underway in the ground segment, too. New technologies like cloud computing, software-defined modems, and other virtual infrastructure are commoditizing increasing swathes of the technology the ground segment has traditionally provided.

In response, teleport operators are seeking new business models like ground-station-as-a-service (GSaaS) and closer integration with cloud and network providers, Robert Bell, executive director of the World Teleport Association, said.

It’s not the first time the industry has had to adapt, he said. “Thirty years ago, it was a decent business to basically just carry a signal for someone. You could put up a signal and charge for it and life was good. But that got commoditized fairly rapidly and the question became ‘What else can you do for me?’ Because you can maybe break even carrying a signal but you can't make money. So the teleport operators began researching very seriously the issue of how to add value.”

The explosion of cloud services and software-defined everything was “just more of the same. Something else is being commoditized and so again, the ground segment business is going to figure out how to get the most value out of it that it can for its customers and for itself,” Bell said.

With the arrival of new Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellations, said Bell, “The whole industry is working out how to be a gateway, but also how to deliver services, how to integrate these services into the package that they're offering to a customer. And some of that's about technology and antennas. And a lot of it's about the business model. And so, everybody's trying to figure that out.”

One solution, he added, is a business model like Speedcast, the global satcom services provider. “Their value add is the specialized services that they are able to provide to meet the very different demands and needs of many individual market segments,” Bell said. “They have very, very deep knowledge of how to most cost effectively serve each of those markets.”

And that knowledge and market experience, explained Speedcast CEO Joe Spytek, means that their business isn’t in the slightest threatened by virtualization, because the value delivered to customers lies in the integration of all those new technologies into a turnkey solution that provides the connectivity and services for specific market segment needs.

The company is partnering with Amazon Web Services to put its network management tools in the cloud, Spytek said. “The more complex this world gets, the more valuable we become to our customers,” he said.

But there are other challenges as ground segment providers seek to integrate cloud services into their offerings. “The learning curve is pretty steep,” ST Engineering iDirect Senior Director for Product Management Darren Pralle told a panel at SATELLITE 2022, “We do a lot of processing, we use a lot of compute in our solutions,” he told the Cloud Technology, Service and Skills Requirements for Teleport Operators session. “But traditionally, [that compute] hasn't been based in a cloud environment. And so that migration, that shift in mindset from a development and from a deployment perspective, certainly was a challenge.”

And it wasn’t just a mindset issue, he explained, there were technical challenges as well. “Just the way our systems run from a ground segment perspective, there were some conflicts in the way that our applications operate within a public cloud environment,” Pralle said.

In the smallsat sector, ground providers faced a different set of challenges with the cloud, Brad Bode, CTO and co-founder of GSaaS pioneer Atlas Space, told a different SATELLITE 2022 session. “I think that one of the problems with the industry is that it's become very complicated. And in order to scale that needs to become easier and more abstracted away from all of the difficulties with the low-level ground systems. That's primarily our focus in smallsat.”

A Bifurcated Hardware Market

On the hardware side of the ground segment, terminal and antenna manufacturers face different and countervailing pressures. On the one hand, the new multi-orbit world and much-hyped emerging antenna technology is creating a wave of demand from high-end users, specifically military and government customers, for ever more exquisite equipment with greater capabilities.

That demand signal has only become louder with recent events in Ukraine, said Tom Kirkland, vice president and general manager of Army and SOCOM business at L3Harris Technologies, “Our customers are calling on us every single day saying, ‘We need new capabilities, we need multi orbit, we need resilient satcom, and we need it immediately.’”

On the other hand, the new LEO and MEO constellations are creating huge new mass markets for low-cost terminals both for consumer at-home connectivity and enterprise customers.

“I live in two different worlds,” Lilac Muller, vice president of product management for Kymeta, told another panel at SATELLITE 2022. “I live in the commercial world where the total cost of ownership is king. And frankly, your customer doesn't care where the data comes from. They just need reliable connectivity at an affordable price.”

But military and government customers were a whole different ball game, she said at the Ground Segment Technology for Multi-Orbit Transmission Services session. “They’re very much ‘I want this.’ They're very specific about their waveforms. They're very specific about what they need.” For example, she said, a big requirement for military customers is operation in GPS-denied environments, which isn’t something commercial customers require.

In response, she said, Kymeta had “bifurcated our product line. So, you have a commercial platform that is cost reduced. We are shaving pennies on that side, so that we can pass that on to our customers. It does not have all the bells and whistles. It doesn't have all the switches. It doesn't have the latest and greatest.”

For their military customers, Muller said, Kymeta produces a fully featured product. “It has the ruggedization, it has all the software bells and whistles that they need, top of the line components, reliability that is different from the commercial environment.”

The two product lines have different quality standards, different market drivers, she said. “There is no one solution that works for both. In fact, we have different guiding principles for each of the two product lines.”

The “Holy Grail” Terminal and Unrealistic Customer Expectations

But even in the military and government segment, end users are overwhelmed by promises, warned Steve Richeson, vice president of sales and marketing for Mission Microwave, which makes radio frequency (RF) amplifiers and block-up converters for satellite terminals. “Ubiquitous global bandwidth is going to be fantastic if you just wait a little while. It's going to be here really, really soon, right? It was going to be here really soon in 1996,” he joked, “In reality, it takes ages for this stuff to happen.”

“There's a lot of excitement, a lot of investment capital, painting these broad visions of how great it's going to be,” Richeson said. But there is a danger it’s setting unrealistic expectations.

The attitude among end users is, “‘We want multi-orbit, we want MEO, GEO, we want LEO,’ without really appreciating the differences between them.” Different orbits place very different demands on terminals, he said, calling them as different as buses and airplanes.

“If you want to go somewhere they’re both transportation, yes,” Richeson said. “But do you really want Bluebird to build your airplane?"

Mission works with terminal manufacturers, so it only experiences the demand signal at second hand, but it is still powerful, Richeson said. There was an unrealistic requirement for a “holy grail,” a terminal able to connect to any satellite in any orbit. “Our customers are pulled by their customers to come up with these ‘be anything do anything terminals,’” he said.

In reality, Richeson explained, transmitting to a GEO satellite from a maritime terminal might require 220 watts of power, compared to a fifth of a watt to reach a LEO satellite. “You can do that with an AA battery,” he joked.

Wrapping both of those wildly different power requirements into a single terminal won’t be efficient or cost effective for either. Yet, said Richeson, the customer insisted: “Bring it on! I'm not going to buy it at that price, but I want you to do the work and design it for me, and integrate it.’ So that's the challenge.”

Complexity Makes Everything Hard

And the different capabilities required by terminals to connect to different orbits is only the beginning of the complexities involved in building a multi-orbit terminal, explained Louis Dubin, senior vice president of product management and marketing for Comtech Telecommunications.

The new MEO and LEO constellations have to be orchestrated, he said, because the terminals have to follow the right satellite across the sky. “The systems need to tell the amplifiers, the antennas, the modems, where to look, what frequency to be on, how to manage the network at any given moment in time.”

That orchestration becomes more complicated with the new constellations, because of the way they will use inter-satellite links and switch gateways to route around bad weather, for example. “All the equipment in that chain of command has to obey some sort of large mothership brain that has to command every single piece of equipment in the path to cooperate and be organized in such a way that the orchestration has to be across the entire value chain,” Dubin said.

“That's a complicated problem. And unfortunately, it's not the same complicated problem for every constellation, depending on the way they’re set up and managed,” he said.

On top of orchestration, Dubin added, another source of complexity with multi-orbit is the issue of waveforms. Ku-band transmissions typically use linear polarization, where the waveform moves up and down, perpendicular to the direction of transmission. But Ka-band uses circular polarization, where the waveform advances corkscrew-style, around the direction of transmission. Many military and government customers require specialty waveforms.

“These aren't easy things to port into software-defined ubiquitous hardware in a simple and easy manner.” Comtech recently acquired another VSAT company, UHP Networks, and spent 18 months so far “porting their waveforms [to our terminals.] Even knowing everything about them, it's just not a simple thing,” he said.

The Niche Versus the Masses

Simple or not, a single multi-orbit terminal is the thing that the U.S. military wants, and wants now, observed L3 Harris’ Kirkland.

Leaders of the U.S. Army acquisition community “have said in multiple forums that they want that multi-constellation capability that Lou was describing. They want access at all times to all three constellations, LEO, MEO and GEO. And they want that single antenna on top of the vehicle that's able to access those different networks,” he said.

But even in the military market, multi-orbit remains a largely niche proposition, Kirkland acknowledged. “Today, I would say multi-orbit is probably less than five percent of our total business. Over the next three to five years, we expect that to grow to more like 15 to 20 percent. It's not exploding by any means.”

Indeed, the potential for explosive growth for the industry lies elsewhere, argued Scott Mumford, CEO of Liquid Intelligent Technologies, a pan-African digital infrastructure provider. Africa has only 34 percent internet penetration, in a continent of 1.4 billion people. That means 800 million people are unable to access the internet, he said.

The barrier of course is the price point. “In most of the rural communities, we're looking at a monthly spend on connectivity of $2," he said.

Not many seemed to be chasing that market, Mumford said. “There's a lot of development and focus on the military applications of the hardware for that multi-orbit [terminal], but until we get a working, cost-effective solution for the masses, you're off down a rabbit hole, trying to work on how you're going to switch between these multi-orbit platforms for the military application, while we’re still not able to provide basic services to the mass of people in Africa.” VS