A Rising D2D Tide Can Lift All Boats

11/12/2024

Just about everybody is excited about the prospects of direct-to-device (D2D) satellite connectivity to cell phones and other mobile devices, even if guardedly so.

Some satellite operators see the potential for breaking out of their historical niches, while mobile network operators (MNO) anticipate more access to untapped remote markets with upsides big enough to pursue. Just last week, for example, Apple announced an additional $1.5 billion investment in partner Globalstar to fund a new constellation.

The ‘guarded’ part is important, however. Obstacles remain in making these two worlds work smoothly together in a way that can support high consumer service expectations.

In a recent session at Silicon Valley Space Week covered by Constellations content partner Space Intel Report, Mark Dankberg, Chairman of Viasat, highlighted two of the biggest challenges: network interoperability and national sovereignty. Dankberg is also Chairman of the Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA), a non-profit industry association formed earlier this year to advance global mobile connectivity for D2D and Internet of Things (IoT) services.

To greatly summarize Dankberg on network interoperability, mobile satellite services providers should make their networks compatible not just with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard that enables 5G, but also with each other’s satellites.

As Peter de Selding wrote for Space Intel Report, “Dankberg said the mobile satellite service industry is faced with the same question posed to MNOs years ago: Remain stove-piped with your own network or open it up to competing providers to allow seamless roaming for customers, and to share the cost of cell towers?”

My (extremely) modest contribution to Dankberg’s premise is just this, it will have benefits far beyond just D2D.

Here’s the good news: if satcom network operators follow the 3GPP standard for 5G release 17 or later, they’ll have the technical solution needed for nearly all satcom interoperability: D2D, low data rate IOT, broadband high data rate applications and more. And not just between satellite operators, but with telecommunications infrastructure they connect to as well.

The combination of vertical and horizonal infrastructure interoperability enabled by the 3GPP standards will open new markets, while also making satellite services simpler for consumers and bring additional benefits, such as more effective terminal-to-beam assignments and better mobility in a spot beam satellite architecture.

And Dankberg is also right about his second major point, sovereignty concerns will be a major challenge for regulators which must be addressed. I couldn’t agree more, and, again, not just for D2D. National security factors always have been a challenge, especially for satellites.

That said, however, while interoperability between networks is one area of my professional expertise, interoperability between nations isn’t, so I’ll leave that one to the MSSA.

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Changing the Narrative on 5G?

10/16/2024

That’s what Deutsche Telekom (DT) says it’s doing, and they may have a point.

At its 2024 Capital Markets Day press conference reported by Telecom TV, DT CEO Tim Höttges said, “5G is a huge success story. And this is a narrative I would like to bring home. We took a look at the 5G business case. We started early with 5G. Everybody [else] is complaining that you can’t make money with 5G but I can assure you, 5G is our success story.”

Indeed, media coverage of 5G has been in phase 2 of the typical from-hype-to disappointment curve lately, but that coverage has been largely focused on the consumer markets expectation of faster speeds. The greater market opportunities are expected in enterprise applications and “machine” connectivity use cases such as IoT.

According to GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the industry association for global system mobile technology (GSMA), “With slow average revenue per user growth in the connectivity business, revenue diversification remains an imperative for operators. As demand expands for solutions across a range of technology areas (cloud, edge, IoT, security), the B2B segment offers significant growth opportunities.”

How significant? The group’s latest research report highlights “an addressable market of more than $400 billion for operators looking to grow revenues in the B2B space. This equates to approximately 35% of the existing mobile operator revenue base worldwide.”

Can satellite get a piece of that growth?

5G will play a big role in bringing those enterprise services to market, in large part because its foundation in the 3GPP standard bakes in advanced services and interoperability, including interoperability with non-terrestrial networks through 5G NTN.

In his press conference, DT’s Höttges cited the success his company has had both in Europe and through its U.S. T-Mobile group where he noted, that at T-Mobile US, “we deployed the 2.5GHz spectrum across the country, and we have blown out the lights of Verizon and AT&T… because we were able to provide countrywide 5G services while these guys were waiting for the clearing of the 3.5 GHz spectrum with a totally different propagation, another build-out logic and more expensive investments – our success is very much based on this clear commitment toward 5G based on the mid-band spectrum.”

The DT companies are betting on scale advantages including those enabled by standards-based technologies like 5G. 5G network coverage in the European national companies is set to rise from 78 percent currently to 95 percent in 2027.

According to DT, Brand Finance ranks Deutsche Telekom as the industry’s most valuable brand worldwide, up by 84 percent compared with 2020. Maybe they’re working on the right narrative.

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Network APIs Gaining Traction

9/17/2024

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been following a growing effort in the telecom industry to inspire development of network application programming interfaces (APIs). Several recent announcements convince me even more that it’s both a real trend, and one the satellite industry should be watching.

APIs allow developers to easily integrate software they create with other applications and platforms. As communication networks become increasingly software defined, network APIs allow enterprise customers and third-party developers to create software that brings additional benefits, including capitalizing on advanced 5G features.

This month Deutsche Telekom AG (DT), T-Mobile (a DT subsidiary) and hubraum, DT’s tech incubator, announced they are hosting their first ever global API competition. Developers from around the world are invited to create new business solutions for customers leveraging APIs in five key areas: Automotive, Broadcasting, Government, Healthcare and Industrial.

Network APIs are not new, but they have mostly been limited to working in only one provider’s network—or network of networks like DT--thus gaining proprietary benefit for that network operator. However, for network APIs to achieve full benefit for the user they should work across multiple networks.

Enter Korea’s three biggest telcos: Korea Telecom, South Korea Telecom and LG Uplus, which announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to work together on a common API standard which they expect will lower developer barriers and shorten the time to market, while also boosting the benefits to Korea’s national infrastructure.

Makes sense, but what if a car company wants its apps to work in Korea and Japan and Idaho and Kenya?

Just last week, Ericsson announced it was joining with many of the world’s largest telecom operators, including América Móvil, AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Reliance Jio, Singtel, Telefonica, Telstra, T-Mobile, Verizon and Vodafone to form a new venture that would “combine and sell” network APIs on a global scale. According to Ericsson, Vonage and Google Cloud will partner with the new company, providing access to their ecosystems of developers and partners.

If I sound like a cheerleader, I don’t mean to. There are plenty of challenges ahead in technology, operations and business models. In the new company mentioned above, for example, Ericsson gets half the revenue and all the other companies split the other half. Is that a viable and scalable model or just a meta version of a proprietary one? We’ll see. But just imagine if global connectivity--including satellite--could be actively controlled in a way that allows the application to optimize the connectivity for its needs within the constraints on the transport technology. Connectivity needs for all customers—consumer, government and enterprises—could be optimized to maximize user experience and network value.

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Is AMIP as Good as a Mile? Progress on Making ESAs Mainstream

8/21/2024

DIFI’s new working group on standards for Electronically Steered Antenna (ESA) interoperability is making much progress, in part because it is much needed and because the 35 member organizations are much engaged, including the U.S. Army.

ESAs are critically important for achieving maximum value for goals such as multi-orbit, multi-mission support, mobility applications and more. Unfortunately, for reasons discussed in an earlier post, the OpenAMIP and OpenBMIP standards that apply today were crafted for a different, far less dynamic era of ground and space technologies.

In a nutshell, the existing monitor and control (M&C) standards were created for a modem controlling a relatively dumb, single purpose parabolic antenna. As a result, more intelligent, multi-purpose phased array antennas are forced to operate as if they were poorly performing parabolics.

The good news is that current standards do their foundational work well, which means DIFI’s working group can focus on augmenting AMIP and BMIP to better mesh M&C with the advanced features and capabilities of ESAs, rather than starting from scratch building an entirely new standard.

For example, the group is exploring topics including handling variations in beam power, support for antennas that can do multi-beam and fast beam switching, and timing synchronization, which is front and center at the moment.

STG iDirect, the original developers of OpenAMIP/BMIP, are fully on board as members of DIFI’s working group. I particularly want to thank Jeremy Turpin, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of ALL.SPACE, for his able and meticulous leadership of the working group.

I encourage any organizations with an interest in ESA antenna operability or the missions that require them, especially government groups who need ESAs to support multi-orbit and multi-mission operations, to join the DIFI ESA Working Group. Visit https://dificonsortium.org/join-now/ for more information on this and other working groups.

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Network APIs and Digital Transformation

7/24/2024

According to McKinsey & Company, network APIs “are critical to companies seamlessly tapping into 5G’s powerful capabilities for hundreds of potential use cases, such as credit card fraud prevention, glitch-free videoconferencing, metaverse interactions, and entertainment. If developers have access to the right network APIs, enterprises can create 5G-driven applications that leverage features like speed on demand, low-latency connections, speed tiering, and edge compute discovery.”

Network APIs have been discussed before in the communications world, but they’re having their time in the sun once again with the evolving network ecology of digital transformation, cloud native, 5G, AI and more. They bridge the worlds of networks, IT, application development and, potentially, satellite. But only if they can be standardized.

That’s the key. Most previous network API projects in telecom have been driven by individual operators seeking to achieve competitive advantage for their networks. When apps only run in one system however, there’s little incentive for third party developers to deliver innovative products.

Instead, the burden falls on the network operator to develop their own apps. Although telcos employ many, many software programmers around the world, they are not optimized to be product developers. Their core business is to provide reliable connectivity services.

What’s more, as we’ve seen for decades in the software world, standard APIs enable enterprises in vertical industries to create their own apps to leverage tech platforms. That’s where competitive advantage helps both the customer and the network operator the most. For example, what if an airline could directly manage and optimize the communications links to their aircraft to ensure the best possible customer experience for their elite customers? A standardized API working across all of their satcom providers could give them this capability.

This month, the GSMA and TM Forum announced they are collaborating on a complete set of APIs to monetize network capabilities using TM Forum’s widely adopted Open API standards and the Linux Foundation’s CAMARA APIs. There’s still a distance to go, of course, but there seems to be real momentum and it’s exciting to see this kind attention.

The satellite industry is too small a part of the global telecom fabric to go it alone on APIs. We should carefully watch what’s happening elsewhere towards achieving standards and participate where we have a common interest in common APIs. The upside is tremendous for advancing interoperability and adding value to satellite network services.

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Plug & Play Digital IF. We’re Getting There

6/26/2024

DIFI held its second PlugFest last week and our first in Europe at Satellite Applications Catapult’s Harwell campus in the U.K.

For those not familiar with the nitty gritty of standards development, a PlugFest is an event to validate the effectiveness of a technology standard by testing how well devices from different manufacturers interoperate. Standards bodies like DIFI hold PlugFests periodically, especially when a new rev of the standard has been released. For DIFI, that’s DIFI 1.2 introduced last September. Members congregated at PlugFest Europe to test compatibility with that release as well as version 1.1 functions.

Nine equipment makers, including ARKA, Evertz, ETL Systems, Keysight, Kratos, Lasting Software, Safran, ST Engineering and Welkin Sciences, submitted for testing an assortment of modems, digitizers, simulators, and testing equipment. Some 178 test cases were executed with 93% of tests at least partially compliant and 75% fully compliant. Makers can take the results back to their labs to tweak the—mostly minor—aspects that did not fully comply. That’s one of the two biggest reasons why PlugFests are held.

The other reason is to help mature the standard. In this event we tested all the submitted products together simultaneously as well as independently. Interestingly, we found that participants addressed one specific area of version 1.2 differently. The solutions worked, but not optimally. This is the real value of the Plugfest for DIFI, since now the Standard Working Group can go back and address any ambiguity in the spec that led to that situation.

The PlugFest helped us tremendously in maturing the DIFI standard and advancing interoperable digital ground systems. I want to lead a round of applause to all who helped organize the event, especially to ETL’s Simon Swift who chairs our DIFI Specification Working Group for his team’s hard work. I also want to thank Dr. Ilias Panagiotopoulos from the European Space Agency’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT) for his keynote address to members, and Harvinder Nagi, Senior Systems Architect-Future Networks, at the UK Space Applications Catapult for chairing our panel session.

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