The flipping of the calendar from 2023 to 2024 gave me the chance to ask some very smart people what they expect from the satellite ground segment in the new year. It is a sector that has lacked luster for a long time. But massive changes in the market have revealed its criticality, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. I asked Will Mudge of Speedcast, Mark Witsaman of Globalstar, Susan Saadat of ETL Systems, Stuart Daughtridge of Kratos Defense & Space and Jesus Mendez of Eutelsat to share their thoughts, which I have combined into a set of predictions from the group.
Have You Seen the Elephant?
Last year marked the moment when LEO communications stopped being the also-ran of the industry and became “the elephant in the room.” If you were at September’s World Satellite Business Week, you heard that phrase over and over again. The elephant, of course, is Starlink. After only three years in business, Starlink estimated that it had more than 2 million subscribers, including growing penetration of business markets. The subscribers were won with the service’s high capacity at low cost – plus a ground terminal that is unbelievably easy to install – and without the benefit of providing a committed information rate.
In 2024, there will be more Starlink deployments, more capacity and the introduction of satellite-to-cell service. OneWeb, now part of Eutelsat, will go to market in a serious way, building on the distribution partnerships it has already announced, and SES will complete its mPower constellation and kick off commercial service from MEO. Add it up and GEO services will be under significant price and capacity pressure.
On the ground, that will translate into putting more services on more antennas. It will also mean driving down costs and differentiating on technical capabilities, with the goal of delivering increased service at a lower price and still being profitable. All this will require a sharp acceleration of automation and orchestration in the teleport technology stack. Software will be king, because it is the only way to make this transition affordable.
Innovating at Speed
If software really will wear the crown, there is just one way to claim it, and that is through standards. The DIFI standard introduced by the Digital IF Interoperability Consortium is still in development, but it points the way to satcom services delivered by fully virtualized ground systems. They will digitize signals close to the antenna and handle signal routing and processing on generic compute capacity, very much including the cloud. All the major vendors are highlighting virtualization now. The only question is how fast market demand will drive them to innovate.
GEO and the Multi-orbit Strategy
Virtualization will have other impacts as well. Flat panel antennas (beyond Starlink’s) will start mass deployment in 2024 and begin having a visible impact on the market. True multi-mission terminals may start to become a reality – because Eutelsat OneWeb and SES will be working hard to prove the value of seamless multi-orbit connectivity. Ground equipment, from antennas to modems, will need to evolve to simultaneously support GEO, MEO and LEO and manage intelligent routing among them.
Another driver of this evolution will be the rising dominance of very high throughput satellites in all orbits. Ground equipment will need to provide dynamic allocation of return channels and waveform optimization, but also manage completely new connectivity scenarios. Just imagine the delights of multi-spot, multi-beam, multi-satellite handovers. All the new flat-panel, phased-array antennas beginning to achieve commercial maturity are likely to find themselves fully employed.
Honorable Mentions: Q/V, DVB-NIP and 5G
As if that weren’t enough, my expert panel suggested some other developments to watch in 2024.
There are already constellations operating in the Q and V band frequencies, though not yet in the commercial sector. But we can expect that this early demand will motivate manufacturers to design and introduce Q and V band frequency converters as well as test equipment. The march to higher frequencies, like the growth of transistors on a silicon chip, seems to know no bounds.
For broadcast markets, a new standard is coming called DVB-NIP, which supports satellite video distribution using a Native IP approach. Several vendors are already presenting solutions to satellite operators for testing. The goal is to have a single converged platform capable of natively streaming incoming video to all devices on the home or business network, while allowing targeted ad insertion, regionalization and other high-value services. Companies that have long served the video distribution market hope to slow its decline with DVB-NIP, and VSAT networks will be able to embrace video at last without modification or conversion.
Speaking of convergence, the continued rollout of 5G networks that comply with non-terrestrial network standards will drive the introduction of edge processing on satcom hubs and easier integration with terrestrial networks. That will increase the pressure on teleports to make cybersecurity a high priority. As satcom loses its reputation as the last resort connectivity and increasingly becomes software-driven, its vulnerability will only increase. Staying steps ahead of the bad guys will become a business imperative.
Will all this frenetic transformation fit into one twelve-month period? Probably not. Technology change rarely happens as fast as we think. Business processes have to evolve to make use of it – and people don’t want change as much as they think they do. But if the experts are right, 2024 may be the year when the people of satcom learn what it’s like to move fast, break things and hope they don’t blow up.
About the Author:
Robert Bell is the executive director of the World Teleport Association (www.worldteleport.org), which conducts research into the teleport and satellite industry, provides a unified voice for teleport operators and offers Teleport Certification programs to raise the standards of the industry. A recent WTA report, Designing the Software-Defined Ground Segment of the Future, is available from the WTA site. The complete report is free for members with their log-in. An executive summary is available here at no cost.
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