For decades the telecom industry has been successfully deploying automation and orchestration techniques to optimize Quality of Service (QoS), reduce manual operations, lower costs and optimize resources. Today, the satellite services business is racing to catch-up.
Shedding light on this issue, the World Teleport Association (WTA) hosted a webinar entitled, “Service automation and orchestration for teleport operators.” The discussion was led by Robert Bell, the Executive Director of the WTA, and included Gint Atkinson, Vice President of Network Strategy and Digital Architecture for SES, Christopher Boyd, Senior Director of Product Management at Kratos and Will Mudge, Vice President of Engineering Operations for Speedcast.
Bell started the session by asking panelists to define service automation and orchestration. Mudge explained that there are two parts, the first step is automating a process and the second step is automating several processes together across many environments, which is orchestration. With the key terms clearly explained, the duration of the session explored the benefits, challenges, and opportunities that satellite carriers and teleport operators face when deploying automation and orchestration within their operations.
Biggest Contributors to Improving Teleport Operations
According to Mudge, the biggest contributor is the ability to automate and orchestrate across systems to bring a better level of service to our customers. He said, “That’s what they expect these days.” When customers are happy, then they want more of the service and that leads to more revenue and market growth. He explained automation and orchestration at the teleport also reduces the total cost basis for operations resulting in improved revenues and new business opportunities.
Atkinson said that when requesting a service from a teleport today, there is still a lot of manual and physical work taking place that requires human intervention, so automation and orchestration offers a huge value. He provided an example of a common manual process today where an operator using two screens moves data from one application (including VLAN IDs, frequencies, time slots, carrier IDs) and populates that information into another application on another screen. That time consuming and manual process can be orchestrated.
Boyd took this point further by discussing the ability to automate services end-to-end for customers through service orchestration. It is about the ability to connect the elements that bring together the satellite service and the teleport and then stitching together access to the Internet or the cloud or whatever service the customer needs in a seamless manner.
Atkinson expanded on this point by explaining that the resources, network and infrastructure necessary to deliver the service to the customer can be orchestrated end-to-end. This frees up staff to become much more productive in terms of monitoring and decision-making. It also enables services to be delivered faster and with higher quality.
Challenges and Opportunities in Teleport Operations
Atkinson pointed to the terrestrial mobile world as a successful model where lessons could be learned for the satellite industry. He explained the telecom industry has successfully automated and orchestrated services for decades by taking advantage of virtualization and software-defined networking techniques.
He highlighted the power of virtualization for teleport operations with an example. Virtualization offers the ability to replace traditional hardware with virtualized functions that reside on shared generic hardware. This enables workloads to easily be moved around to different places. If a gateway gets completely wiped out, it becomes possible to failover from one gateway to another gateway and spin up the workload of baseband processing at another location. The satellite then repoints the beams and within seconds or under a minute a new failover site is online.
Mudge agreed with the vision that virtualization is critical to future orchestration efforts at the teleport. He did bring up one of the biggest challenges to orchestration efforts in a virtual environment – integrating with legacy systems. He explained that there are always devices at the teleport that you are not able to virtualize like the amplifiers, LNBs and redundancy controllers.
Boyd picked on this point stating that there is still a lot of capital investments that have been made in physical infrastructure in the teleport and that is not going away any time soon. Standards are critical to being able to bring these devices into the digital world, whether that means making an adapter to bring in that legacy physical function and then represent it virtually or control it through an orchestration or automation framework. It becomes critical to include the physical and virtual devices as part of a successful orchestration strategy across the teleport.
Atkinson sees many lessons to be learned from the mobile telecom industry, but also acknowledges that the satellite industry is extremely far behind from a technology perspective. He points to advancements in the mobile world such as standardized types of baseband processing, beamforming, beam shaping and access to all sorts of antenna technology that has benefited from massive scale.
Boyd explained that the satellite industry is making good progress and points to how it is embracing digital IF to convert analog signals to IP streams, virtualizing infrastructure to move from proprietary hardware to software on generic compute and taking advantage of powerful cloud capabilities. This enables a whole new approach to orchestration at the teleport and at the edge, holding the potential to deliver a quicker time to revenue by delivering services faster and at higher quality.
Discussing new opportunities, Atkinson pointed out that as the satellite industry moves toward virtualization, the cloud and 5G, it becomes “crystal clear” that the teleport iss a great place to put an edge platform. It is an extraordinary opportunity for teleport operators to take advantage of their geographic location to share resources with infrastructure, providing processing and data storage closer to the sources of the data to improve response times and save bandwidth.
Atkinson continued, “Once you have the standardized virtualization and orchestration environment, everything becomes dynamic.” He sees a future where teleports operate more like the telecom world. Today, if you have 20 different teleports and you want to bring up a new gateway at a teleport, it is a very time-consuming process. He compared it to the telecom world, where a full Ericsson stack can be up and running in under an hour. There is no reason why that shouldn’t be possible to do in the satellite industry in the near future.
Mudge stated that it’s not as cut and dry with virtualization going into the teleport. He can see how teleports get backhauled to a Point of Presence (PoP) where everything is virtualized. Where the infrastructure is located has not been decided yet. He explained moving the edge to the teleport makes sense for Earth Observation, so you can process the data and move it as quickly as possible to where it needs to go. But some customers want to take different approaches for their specific applications.
Mudge provided an example based on Speedcast’s teleport in Miami which is used to backhaul information to a range of cloud environments. Some of their customers have their own hosted systems within these particular cloud environments. Other approaches are also being used where the signal processing is not taking place at the teleport – it is backhauled to a data center. With the virtual and software-defined approach, teleport operators can digitize the IF signals and transport it to a PoP or a cloud service provider and process the information at that location.
Atkinson continued the discussion focusing on the role of the teleport. He envisions a future where you have thousands of satellites in the sky and lots of wireless infrastructure on the ground that takes advantage of new technologies such as 5G Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) to mesh all the networks together. He explained that when this happens the definition of a teleport blurs. He provided an example of a tower company that points its antenna in the sky and transports customer data through satellites because it’s the best route bypassing the terrestrial infrastructure.
Atkinson explained that tower companies have adopted an edge strategy and that in the future teleports may take a similar path because they also have similar geographical advantages and high-quality facilities ideal for an edge platform. He sees teleports becoming a special kind of tower company that “focuses on having the assets, the bigger antennas and other assets that are more unique to working with the satellite.”
Boyd agreed that much like the tower companies that provide processing power at the edge, the teleport operators have an opportunity to follow the same strategy and re-define what the teleport looks like in the future. He said teleport operators have some interesting choices in terms of their future investments.
Atkinson explained that by adopting an edge strategy, there is a big opportunity for teleport operators to distribute content by caching it at the edge. He explained that teleports are in a sweet spot between satellite assets and certain types of ground demand to make this vision a reality.
Successful Teleport Operations: The Five Year Vision
Atkinson compared teleport operations to those in the telecom world and sees a lot of room for automation in the Network Operations Center (NOC). He pointed to cloud service providers as an example. They have highly automated operations in the NOC with ten to fifteen people per shift taking care of billions of dollars in revenue. He stated teleport operators have to move to more automated and orchestrated approaches or risk having others in the industry take over some of those efforts.
Boyd articulated a vision where the NOC moves from a focus on managing infrastructure to one more concentrated on services including the customer and their expectations. He pointed out that many teleport operators have made this shift, but the satellite industry as a whole needs to become more end-to-end service aware. Boyd explained that if the satellite industry is going to integrate successfully with terrestrial networks service automation and orchestration is going to be a requirement because the telecom industry already has established processes, expectations and timeframes.
Mudge provided his insights as well saying, “Five years from now, if the NOC’s not automated, it’s not going to exist.” With all the innovation in space, things must happen faster and in a more automated fashion in the NOC. There will be less manual work being done by staff and more tweaking of the parameters on which the orchestration works in the teleport. He also reiterated that if teleport operations don’t become more automated – then that process will be taken care of by somebody else – customers or other providers.
