Remote Connectivity & Overcrowded Network Relief

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all right you're listening to another episode of the CTO advisor podcast we're going to do some space networking I think this is a first I don't think we've ever actually done space networking it's kind of a a thing that's been reserved for my friends at the packet pushers but more and more as we're thinking about these concepts of universal access Global access uh obviously powering AI and the uh feeding training data from these far remote systems it's becoming a question that my audience has started to

ask more about so uh the sales director Jim King the sales director of SES stepped up to to the plate they've sponsored a podcast episode but we're going to talk stories and why this topic is so important Jim welcome to the podcast thank you Keith good to be here so first off when I think of satellite uh internet the first thing that I think of is too expensive not enough bandwidth too much latency but that is kind of the technical and financial hurdles we'll get to

that part of the conversation and we'll talk about the sces value specifically but I wanted to start the conversation off on why is why is I'm going to call it space networking why is space networking important that's a great question um you know I started in this business about six years ago and at that time I'd come from the telephone World Telephone Company world and I thought satellite was just kind of this thing that's in the back office that very few people do um now that

I've entered the space I realize satellite Network is everywhere um basically any kind of a moving vehicle be it a ship an airplane trucks trains uh most of them are connected with internet and they're connected through satellite and there are many many locations around the world where terrestrial service isn't an option and so the way the world connects to the world is through um through through satellite and then there ALS that's those are primary use cases uh there's also the second use case which would be

a backup or Disaster Response or whatever but the bottom line is uh it's it's everywhere it's becoming more important and it's being utilized more and more so every day so let's talk about the the current state of the technology there's this concept of uh kind of the traditional sense of Geo located uh satellites the stuff that's in deep space and then kind of this lower Earth satellite talk to what what is the sces offering and where what space do you folks play in yeah that's a

great question so we started like a lot of the world did in the Geo world and um the geosynchronous orbit it's a very simple uh Communications mechanism um works really well it's it's simple to deploy um but it's pretty far those satellites are pretty far away so the distance creates a little bit of latency about 600 Mill seconds round trip so that can be a problem for some applications um however Geo is still a great great great uh uh orbit for many many use cases um

about 10 years ago we created this miop space medium earth orbit and we currently have 20 satellites in orbit we're adding another six in the process of adding those now and uh moo is a quarter of the distance from Earth as the Geo assets are so basically it's a quarter of the latency so that's a real Advantage they have a slightly different field of view but the way we've deployed it um we're providing significally more bandwidth particularly on the return side and uh and then most

recently you've heard about the Leo which is low earth orbit and those satellites uh have even a lower latency or a potential for lower latency um the way they've been deployed so far is more like in the retail side or or the consumer side rather um but uh we we are actually playing in that field as well through a resale model uh for some clients have asked for that type of service we don't have our own Assets in Leo orbit currently um but uh we believe

that all orbits have a place and um and so we're big believer in multi-orbit approaches to issues yeah I can easily think of use cases for geo located satellite obviously much wider coverage area uh uh the maybe lower bandwidth but again when you need to get to very bespoke places on the globe this geoc coverage less satellites lower little bit lower expense I would imagine other than getting them into that higher orbit yeah there's plenty of use cases then when you get to this me level

you're getting a little bit closer to you know kind of real time and collaborative appar uh uh collab ation you can start using you know zoom and everything those types of solutions and then obviously with Leo you you're obviously getting to the lower latency stuff the lower of the orbit I think the rule of thumb the low of the orbit orbit the lower L latency and obviously the higher the bandwidth what are some of the applications you're seeing for the Mi versus the goo sure so

so goo there's nothing better for broadcast than goo um you know the the coverage area nothing beats it and uh the latency is not an issue right you're streaming video so um today there's nothing better than goo for broadcast and so we think go is always going to play a role because of that um the way we've deployed moo is um is we' provided with really high bandwidth really high throughput particularly on the return speeds and so whereas today um the maximum throughput for data that

you might see on a go that might be like 140 megabits something like that that'd be pretty high in the Mio world we can deliver multiple gigabits of speed and so that's a whole another ball game when I'm saying multiple gigabits for Mio and 100 and some megabits for geo I'm talking about dedicated uh capacity this is not shared it's not um you know uh contended for it's it's it's pure latency or pure uh throughput and in the Leo world the way it's been deployed so

far you're exactly right it has the opportunity for the lowest latency um but the way it's been deployed so far it's it's a highly contended bandwidth and so the speeds may be high but it's also contended so uh your your actual um experience may vary depending upon what other users there are in your area at that time yeah I've definitely experienced this I you don't know this we haven't prepped you on on this I'm an rver and the and I'm a content creator me and my

wife will go on the road for up to a 100 days a year and I need to I need bandwidth no matter where I'm at and one of the challenges with these Leo type Solutions have been when I've had to you know use it as opposed to 4G or or LT or 5G uh has been this unpredictable nature I don't know how much bandwidth I'm going to get when I need to upload a massive YouTube video or whatever the case while uh extremely prevalent the the

uh you know the leader in that space extremely prevalent I just don't know what I'm going to get when it comes to bandwidth so when you're thinking about these specific U cases whether it's Dr when I need to do data replication from my you know on premises data center or my large uh oral rig somewhere else and I need to replicate data from that location to another one bandwidth needs to be consistent if not fast it needs to be extremely consistent if I am getting a

consistent 100 megabits I can plan around that just as long as I have a dedicated 100 megabits if I get a consistent one gigabit again I can engineer around that so with that said what type of use cases specifically are you seeing around around this and how has the technology changed over the years I'm looking at a pre press release about you know something that's fairly technical 03b which is about you know kind of how how do you narrow the signal where are you seeing kind

of the applicability of these Technologies from a business a set of business use cases sure so um and I talked about you know broadcast for geo um if you want really high throughput that's for the 03b which is what the the company named for Mia services and the new generation which we're going to be uh bringing online in the second quarter of 2014 2024 rather is uh our ower service and where that makes a difference is where you have to have really high speeds and I

mean 100 megabits plus uh forward in return up to even a gigabit or more forward in return um if you need those kinds of speeds and dedicated and low latency consistently low latency that's where Mo it stand stands alone and so some of the use cases for that may be um if you think about a a vessel uh maybe a aircraft carrier or a cruise ship which has a lot of people on it and they're in one place that you can't connect a cable to uh

Mio is really the right solution for them or in power um equally if you're talking about a an area like the gpose islands or the Cook Islands in the South Pacific um where you have a population a lot of folks there thousands of people and you can't get fiber there or it's not particularly reliable because of earthquakes and things that happened there um it's how that it's how that those people communicate with the world it's how they connect to medical assistance it's how they um it's

how they do Commerce it's how they get tourists into that area because they can continue to stay connected to the world it it it's it's basically how some place in the world it's the only way they can connect and so um what what Mia or Empower does is it gives you so much throughput that um you can you can use it across a vast population of people basically it's a it's like a carrier grade level so if you're a carrier in this island you would download

a a moo capacity and then you would spread that across the entire population because you be dealing I love the use case and I love the capability let's talk about kind of speed to Value sure one of the problems with collateral uh bandwidth is that you know you have to dig a trench you have to ride away you have to have uh uh undistracted views so not undistracted views but you know the the path when you when I'm thinking about getting over or past a mountain

range right that's not a you know that's not a small thing to overcome you know you gave the uh Island use case you know it's one thing to get the bandwidth over the sea to the island and then you have the terrain in the island on the island itself so let's talk about speed to Value what what's the provision time like to provision like a me solution from a customer perspective oh wow if you compare it to fiber it's it's instantaneous um you know basically um

you know you get the equipment shipped in to the location um you point the antennas to the satellites they these they move in the moo orbit by the way they do in Leo as well um but you get those connected and it may be a few hours to do that and you're up and running um you know so it can be instantaneous nearly uh particularly when it comes to fiber you may not uh you know may take a very long time to get that deployed one

of the use cases I I learned recently that was particularly interesting I thought about it this way is like the gpus islands as an example um you know that's a very Rich uh natural environment the ecosystem is one that you don't want to damage right and so um any of the fiber options would have potentially caused Great damage to the reefs uh to the the natural Wildlife there and and the Ecuador which is the country that that involves uh Gus they basically were very concerned about

it and and with Mi service they were able to deliver the service that that can reach the thousands of people that live on the galpagos islands I didn't realize that that many people there either but uh there are thousands of people there and it's a way to get Communications to them quickly without damaging the very precious ecosystem that the gpus islands are part of and um and it just it's there's no other way to there's no better way to keep connect that they could identify and

this is uh the the additional bandwidth that that gave them is what uh uh made this such a great project so so in that example who's the SE sees customer is it a service provider local in the gpos or is it in users directly no it would be the the government uh the local telephone agency um is who we work with directly so um in the moo space the way SCS is deployed it we don't go direct to Consumer we we go strictly to um a

provider or government agency that um would be able to take a very large amount of bandwidth and then distribute it to a population um on on the ground so um it's it's very much that way yeah all right and then that brings up the the commercial relationship is with the Telco it's with the government Etc from help us understand like the economics of this is this something that is competitive with you know what's the competitive story is it saying oh you know what this is just

you just don't have an option so you're kind of captive to the price or are you getting to the point that you're competing with something like a 5G rollout yes so it's a great question and typically where we deploy the moo service it's to an area that can't get internet any other way and so they've tried fiber it's too expensive um they look at geoc capacity there's not enough bandwidth to to meet the need and the Mio service of the Empower service meets exactly what they're

looking for particularly on the return speeds which can be critical and so um it's it's actually very economical service to provide and what we do is we provide the bandwidth to as you said the agency or the the government agency that uh is purchasing that service from us then they uh take that band withd and and send it out to their uh connection points and they'll contend that bandwidth and it gets to be very very economical to do it that way so one kind of constituent

we haven't talked about is cloud providers this seems like a pretty good backbone option for cloud providers to provide services in you know far and dispersed areas yes it's actually uh something that we're um working with very closely we work with Amazon we work with Microsoft um we have uh very very high-speed connections to those Cloud providers and uh it enables our customers to get access to their cloud data with a single hop it it's it's very efficient um it reduces the time it takes the

latency if you will to get to their applications and that can be anywhere in the world so let's say in an Azure Microsoft Azure has this as one of the best backbone connections doesn't even have to be in a local area such as the gpos they could be in the nearby continent or country uh if they have a sces backbone which I think you folks are big partners of Microsoft then that is literally that one hop right into the data center as opposed to needing Traverse

several carriers yeah that's correct so the remote may be in the middle of some very rural area um and then the first drop back to Earth which is our Gateway would have an express route connection to Microsoft uh which would look like they're directly connected to the cloud no matter where they are so I think one of the things one of the ways we've been looking at this so far in this conversation is from the consumer angle of the service if you're a consumer and you're

writing on a backbone by Telco a government that's providing this service then you get this benefit of the sces meal network but if you're a service provider not service fighter big like a taelo but let's say you're building a application and you want to serve this far Edge this is a great way to think about your application design get into the data centers that have sces connections and now uh from a latency perspective you're one hop away from servicing these specialized users where does this become

important in my mind you know you're thinking uh I'm thinking whether we're talking about defense uh customers who are on you know something akin to a battlefield or you're thinking about mining operations something that's so far flung but have pretty consistent bandwidth requirements you can combine both this satellite capability and the C capability of the cloud provider to service this far Edge absolutely and we have an example of that with uh the nation of Taiwan we uh worked with Microsoft to create 5G bubble where their

uh First Responders uh connected to their Microsoft Azure Cloud which is down in Australia and 7,000 miles away and it enabled them an emergency responses fires earthquakes what have you to access that critical data as well as for the various response agencies to coordinate activities with each other yeah so I can see a world where Architects their teams with Cloud providers carriers are getting together and designing similar to how we do when we're connecting a customer to internet to or some specialized Network this isn't I'm

starting to realize this isn't a satellite versus 5G conversation this might be a satellite plus 5G conversation so you know how do I get that basic connectivity to my 5G sales in an area that I'm going to provide you know head handset type service too ultimately with satellite being that backend exactly and so in the United States as an example um we see moo as a very critical component to building out a 5G Network um if you're moving to an area that doesn't have the fiber

there yet you can put in a f a Mio service or an Empower service and you can get those 5G type connections while you're in the process of building fiber to that location and conversely when there are disasters that wipe out an entire area and the cell phone uh you know cell towers are wiped out in an area the telephone companies can come in with moo service and they can restore 5G capability uh over satellite um to that area until the towers are rebuilt and this

helps with uh fire with rescue uh with rebuilding it uh allows loved ones to connect to home and say I'm okay um it's it's a very important part of the business it's something that I'm actually very proud to be a part of so Jim let's end on the relationship note customers a lot of my podcast listeners are both service providers and their end customers how do they reach out to sces like how do I how do they develop a relationship and saying you know what this

sounds Keith this is exactly what I need I'm a service provider I'm looking to partner or I'm an enduser organization and I'm looking to consume how do they develop a relationship well they can reach out to us at scs.com there's information in there that tells that tells you how to reach out to us all the offices around the world um and that's probably the best way to get started um we'd love to work with you and um we're very proud of what we do and um

uh basically I think um it's a very exciting business to be a part of all right and if you want to find out more about the CTO advisor you can follow us on the web the CTO advisor.com we're now a futurum group company though so you can find us on the futurum group website as well in due time you want to learn more about me or you want to engage with me and you want to ask further questions about space networking which is a favorite topic

of mine you can reach out on t at C advisor or on x.com rather and then LinkedIn obviously we can have the conversation until then talk to you next CT advisor podcast thanks Jim hey thank you k