Why have interoperability standards lagged in the satellite world when they have been embraced for decades in related domains like IT and telecom?
Until recently, there’s been a pretty good reason for it: bandwidth optimization.
Historically, the business of commercial satellite has been dominated by broadcast, with IP transport services filling in the gaps. But traditional FSS satellites were—and still are—severely bandwidth limited, so satellite operators looked to their ground vendors to help them milk all the bandwidth available.
Vendors responded by delivering systems that took standard waveforms and added proprietary technologies to optimize the bits/Hz for each specific application. It was the right move for the time to maximize both revenue and profits, though it became a major obstacle to interoperability.
And now the world of space networks is changing. Radically.
Broadcast and FSS satellites are in steady decline. Ultra HTS and software-defined satellites are now designed for—and sometimes exclusively for—IP transport with massive bandwidth reuse and significant total throughput. New technologies like software-defined networking and virtualization are coming into play, supporting new market opportunities like in-flight connectivity, IoT and smoother telecom integration.
Bandwidth efficiency is no longer the top priority. It is being overtaken by the need to cost-effectively support dynamic IP networks at scale. Increasingly, the way to drive down the cost of each bit delivered is more about scaling the ground system operations and less about bandwidth optimization.
Supporting these new satellites, technologies and dynamic services requires interoperability, automation and standard ways of working between networks, systems and sub-systems. As Lluc Palerm, Principal Analyst at Northern Sky Research noted at a recent event, “With bandwidth commoditizing, success will come from how well the different networking elements (including terrestrial) are orchestrated.”
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