ALEXANDRIA, Va. — At an online event produced by GVF, executives from Intelsat, Kratos, SES and ST Engineering iDirect discussed the partnerships taking hold between cloud and satellite service providers and how moving to the cloud will impact service offerings in the future.

The panelists agreed that cloud adoption was positively transforming the industry by pushing it to embrace virtualization, standardization and innovations at the edge.

“Cloud service providers themselves are embracing space strategies more directly,” said Karl Horne, VP of Cloud Solutions for SES. In the last three years, Microsoft Azure has teamed up with SES, Intelsat, KSAT, Viasat, SpaceX and others to provide cloud services. AWS’s ground station-as-a-service business is providing cloud services for the EO satellite operators, like Maxar, Spire and others. Google, along with several private cloud providers, have also formed significant partnerships in the satellite industry.

The two worlds are coming closer together. Satellite service providers are evolving to cloud-based delivery models and cloud-native architectures.

This is making more synergies possible, Horne added. “I think there’s a natural alignment of cloud and space infrastructure, so it’s creating some previously unexploited ecosystem partnerships.”

The panelists emphasized the importance of cloud computing in supporting the digital transformation underway in the satellite industry. Stuart Daughtridge, Vice President of Advanced Technology at Kratos, noted that the ground segment has lagged behind the space segment, where operators are deploying high and very-high throughput satellites, multi-orbit constellations and software-defined payloads. “I don’t think any of those can reach their full potential without [ground services] adopting cloud technologies of virtualization and software-defined networking,” he said.

The shift from racks of hardware to virtualized network functions is fundamentally changing the business model for ground service providers. Sean Yarborough, Vice president of Product Management at ST Engineering iDirect, noted that the cloud-based model “enables you to get solutions and services to market and increase your time to revenue.”

In previous years, customers who wanted to scale operations or expand to a global presence would have made significant up-front CAPEX investments and waded through the lengthy process of ordering, shipping installing and configuring physical hardware at one or multiple sites. Abstracting those functions and running them in a virtual environment reduces the time to market from months or years to days or weeks.

Cloud Driving Adoption of Standards

Webinar participants agreed that the satellite industry’s use of open, industry-recognized standards would be critical to integrating satellite and cloud platforms, as well as satellite and telecom networks. Several of the largest satellite service providers have already been certified for telecom industry standards, like MEF and 3GPP and are moving toward 5G. A large portion of the industry has also thrown its support behind the DIFI standards for digital IF interoperability.

“The satellite industry is recognizing that it’s better to be part of the larger telecom ecosystem than to be a special niche capability,” said Daughtridge, who also serves as chairman of the independent DIFI Consortium.

For example, by adopting MEF standards (which define Carrier Ethernet services, performance attributes, application interface, etc.), users could reasonably expect continuous and configurable end-to-end service, whether it was coming from a traditional telco or satellite provider. The future adoption of 5G standards would enable interoperability between satellite and terrestrial “in a way we have never seen before,” Yarborough noted.

The other panelists affirmed that standards adoption (5G in particular) would be key to the future of the satellite industry. This new consensus marked a break from previous attitudes about satellites as single-purpose systems that were incompatible with traditional telecommunications networks.

Edge Computing at the Antenna?

Edge computing is becoming a more sought-after service, according to industry executives, with customers looking to move processing closer to end users rather than routing traffic to a mobile network core.

“Edge computing and satellite technology seem to be made for each other,” said Albie Bester, Market Development Manager at Intelsat. Earlier this year, Intelsat did a proof of concept with Microsoft Azure, running a private LTE network across a satcom network. Bester elaborated on the potential real-world uses, noting how edge computing could run worker tracking and monitoring services or augmented reality applications at a remote mine site in Perth. Using satellite connection to establish a private 5G network, the services could run on-site in milliseconds, instead of relying on terrestrial fiber.

“To me, edge computing is the next evolution of cloud and making cloud available anywhere on the globe,” Bester said.

With more of the satellite ground station becoming virtualized, there is a greater push for edge computing at the gateway. Yarborough said ST-iDirect was looking at running network management system applications at the edge over a public cloud. The idea is to run less latency-sensitive and processing-intensive applications initially. In the future, ST-iDirect and others envision a role for baseband processing at the edge.

It is also likely that the gateway, which is viewed as one edge of the satcom network, may become a central node, with data centers and gateways occupying the same site, according to Horne. This transformation will align with the broader satcom trend of in-country and regional gateways, he added.

“Because so many functions out of satellite communications architecture are going to become virtualized and because so much of the data collecting needs cloud hyperscale and analytics, I think we’re going to see a natural convergence of datacenters and ground stations,” he said.

While that deployment model will create new ground station capabilities, Horne advised it could also create another “stove-piped” environment for satcoms. The way to avoid that, he noted, is for the industry to embrace standardization.