Ground Segment Debate Shifts to Virtualization, Orchestration, Cloudification

The satellite ground segment is becoming more software and service-centric as players cater to customers’ ambitious strategies, segment leaders said during a ground tech panel at World Satellite Business Week in Paris on Tuesday.

Ron Levin, COO of Gilat Satellite Networks, said the company had been working on its next generation ground platform, which takes into account multiple orbits. Gilat is changing its approach here. “It needs a different kind of ground platform, more virtualized, more flexible. Whether these are [Geostationary Orbit] GEO or non-GEO systems, they have to work together. This means the sheer scale of the deployment becomes more challenging. This is the drive towards virtualization and more orchestration. We need to move the capacity flexibly, supporting planes, ships, enterprise, consumers,” Levin said.

Levin said Gilat saw a slump aviation and other mobility markets because of the pandemic, but these and other markets are showing signs of progress. “Deliveries are starting to come back. Enterprise and cellular backhaul are coming back faster. They are faster than mobility,” he said.

Vagan Shakhgildian, president of the Commercial Group for Comtech Telecommunications Corp said the company had been laying the groundwork for its future growth. Comtech is building two new manufacturing facilities, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States, as it looks to meet increasing demand.

Shakhgildian said the number the one challenge is scale. “The gateways that are being manufactured now are reasonably complex. But, it is not only that, you have to manufacture a lot of them. You need to build to scale. Hence, why we are building new manufacturing facilities. There are enormously high throughputs needed now. We are preparing for that. It is not just about multi-orbit, it is about being multi-system. We are looking at solutions that combine satellite [Low-Earth Orbit [LEO] and GEO and terrestrial means of communication.”

ST Engineering iDirect works with a number of major operators on ground infrastructure, including SES. Thomas Van den Driessche, president CCO talked about the influence of virtualization and cloud in the company’s operations. The company has recently been involved in end-to-end testing of 5G over satellite and signed a deal with Microsoft to leverage Azure software radio tools to enable its satcom solutions through the Azure cloud platform.

Van den Driessche spoke of the need for a tighter integration between ground and satellite, as companies look to manage resources across multiple orbits. He also said that ground players (and the broader satellite industry) can learn from terrestrial standardization as they look to expand their service and product offerings.

“We are trying to leverage all of these things and come up with new solutions. We deal in solving gaps in technologies. For example, how do you bring IoT services to existing satellites and multi-orbit satellites? We are looking to enable our customers with their ambitious plans and fill these gaps,” he said.

Like others, David Gelerman, CEO of SpaceBridge, highlighted the thinking that ground players need to become part of a much bigger overall network deployment. “There is all this talk of software-defined satellites, software-defined radios, etc. In many ways now, we are as much of a software company as we are a hardware company,” Gelerman said.

He also brought up broader challenges, like the price of composite materials and talent acquisition. The price of composite materials has gone up, and he does not think it will ever drop again. On the talent issue, Gelerman said said, “We have a lack of proper staffing. Many people changed direction career-wise [during the pandemic]. It has been difficult to hire people.”

Phil Carrai, president of Space, Training and Cybersecurity for Kratos, believes it is an exciting time to be part of the ground segment. He highlighted the perfect storm of increased operator capital investment coupled with the U.S. government and other governments being open with technology approaches to satellite. All of this is coming while there is a major technology refresh underway.

“There is a lot of money going into this space now,” Carrai said. “It is a good time to be involved.”