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 is kind of a thing that's been reserved for my friends at the packet pushers. I. and feeding training data from these far remote systems is becoming a question that my audience has started to ask more about. S. stepped up 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. Good to be here. So first off, when I think of satellite. 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. S. value pop specifically. But I want 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. 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. Now that I've entered the space, I realize satellite networking is everywhere. Basically any kind of a moving vehicle, be it a ship, an airplane, trucks, trains, 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 satellite. And then there are also those are primary use cases. There's also the secondary use case, which would be a backup or disaster response or whatever. But the bottom line is it's everywhere and it's becoming more important and it's being utilized more and more so every day. So let's talk about the current state of the technology.

There's this concept of kind of the traditional sense of geo-located satellites, the stuff that's in deep space and then kind of this lower earth satellite. Talk to what is the SES offering and 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 the geosynchronous orbit is a very simple communications mechanism. Works really well. It's simple to deploy, but it's pretty far, the satellites are pretty far away.

So the distance creates a little bit of latency, about 600 milliseconds round trip. So that can be a problem for some applications. However, geo is still a great, great, great orbit for many, many use cases. About 10 years ago, we created this MEO 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 MEO 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, we're providing significantly more bandwidth, particularly on the return side. And then most recently you've heard about the LEO, which is low earth orbit. And those satellites have even a lower latency or a potential for lower latency. The way they've been deployed so far is more like in the retail side or the consumer side rather. But we are actually playing in that field as well through a resale model for some clients have asked for that type of service.

We don't have our own assets in LEO orbit currently, but we believe that all orbits have a place. And so we're a 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, the maybe lower bandwidth. But again, when you need to get to the very bespoke places on the globe, this geo coverage less satellites, a little bit lower expense, I would imagine, other than getting them into that higher orbit.

There's plenty of use cases. Then when you get to this LEO level, you're getting a little bit closer to, you know, kind of real time and collaborative collaboration. You can start using, you know, zoom and everything, those types of solutions. And then obviously with LEO, you're obviously getting to the lower latency stuff, the lower the orbit. I think the rule of thumb, the lower the orbit, the lower latency, and obviously the higher the bandwidth. What are some of the applications you're seeing for the MEO versus the geo?

Sure. So geo, there's nothing better for broadcast than geo, you know, the coverage area, nothing beats it. And the latency is not an issue, right? You're streaming video. So today there's nothing better than geo for broadcast. And so we think geo is always going to play a role because of that. The way we've deployed MEO is we provide it with really high bandwidth, really high throughput, particularly on the return speeds. And so whereas today, the maximum throughput for data that you might see on a geo asset might be like 140 megabits, something like that, that'd be pretty high.

In the MEO world, we can deliver multiple gigabits of speed. And so that's a whole nother ballgame. When I'm saying multiple gigabits for MEO and 100 and some megabits for geo, I'm talking about dedicated capacity. This is not shared. It's not, you know, contended for. It's pure latency or pure 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. But the way it's been deployed so far, it's a highly contended bandwidth.

And so the speeds may be high, but it's also contended. So your actual experience may vary depending upon what other users there are in your area at that time. Yeah, I've definitely experienced this. You don't know this. We haven't prepped you 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 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 LTE or 5G 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 extremely prevalent, the 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 cases, whether it's DR, when I need to do data replication from my, you know, on premises data center or my large or 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 hundred megabits, I can plan around that. As long as I have a dedicated hundred 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 this and how has the technology changed over the years? I'm looking at a press release about, you know, something that's fairly technical. Oh, three B, 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 set of business use cases? Sure. So I talked about broadcast for geo. If you want really high throughput, that's where the oh three B, which is what the company name for our services and the new generation, which we're going to be bringing online in the second quarter of 2014, 2024, rather, is our empower service. And where that makes a difference is where you have to have really high speeds.

And I mean, 100 megabits plus forward and return up to even a gigabit or more forward and return. If you need those kinds of speeds and dedicated and low latency, consistently low latency, that's where Mio stands alone. And so some of the use cases for that may be if you think about a vessel, maybe an 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 me is really the right solution for them or empower equally.

If you're talking about an area like the Galapagos Islands or the Cook Islands in the South Pacific where you have a population, a lot of folks are thousands of people and you can't get fiber there or it's not particularly reliable because of earthquakes and things that happen there. 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 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's it's basically how some places in the world, it's the only way they can connect. And so what what Mio or Empower does is it gives you so much throughput that you can you can use it across a vast population of people. It basically it's a it's like a carrier grade level. So if you're a carrier in this island, you would download a Mio capacity and then you would spread that across the entire population because you're dealing so a lot. I love the use case and I love the capability.

Let's talk about kind of a speed to value. One of the problems with telestral bandwidth is that, you know, you have to dig a trench. You have to ride away. You have to have 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 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 Mio solution from a customer's perspective? Oh, wow. If you compare it to fiber, it's instantaneous. You know, basically, you know, you get the equipment shipped into the location, you point the antennas to the satellites, they move in the Mio orbit, by the way, they do in Leo as well. But you get those connected and it may be a few hours to do that and you're up and running, you know, so it can be instantaneous nearly particularly when it comes to fiber.

You may not, you know, may take a very long time to get that deployed. One of the use cases I learned recently that was particularly interesting, I thought about it this way, is like the Galapagos Islands, as an example, you know, that's a very rich natural environment. The ecosystem is one that you don't want to damage. Right. And so any of the fiber options would have potentially caused great damage to the reefs, to the natural wildlife there. And in Ecuador, which is the country that involves Galapagos, they basically were very concerned about it.

And with Mio service, they were able to deliver the service that can reach the thousands of people that live on the Galapagos Islands. I didn't realize there's that many people there either, but 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 Galapagos Islands are part of. And it just there's no other way to there's no better way to connect that they could identify. And this is the additional bandwidth that that gave them is what made this such a great project.

So in that example, who's the SES customer? Is it a service provider local in the Galapagos or is it end users directly? No, it would be the government. The local telephone agency is who we work with directly. So in the Mio space, the way SES has deployed it, we don't go direct to consumer. We go strictly to a provider or government agency that would be able to take a very large amount of bandwidth and then distribute it to a population on the ground.

So it's very much that way. Yeah. All right. And then that brings up the the commercial relationship is with the telco is with the government, et cetera. 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 Mio service, it's to an area that can't get Internet any other way. And so they've tried fiber. It's too expensive. They look at geo capacity. There's not enough bandwidth to meet the need. And the Mio servers to the empower service meets exactly what they're looking for, particularly on the return speeds, which can be critical. And so 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 is purchasing that service from us.

Then they take that bandwidth and send it out to their 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 something that we're working with very closely. We work with Amazon. We work with Microsoft. We have very, very high speed connections to those cloud providers.

And it enables our customers to get access to their cloud data with a single hop. It's very efficient. 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 Azure, Microsoft Azure has this as one of the backbone connections, doesn't even have to be in a local area such as the Galapagos. They could be in a nearby continent or country if they have a SES 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 to traverse several carriers.

Yeah, that's correct. So the remote may be in the middle of some very rural area. And then the first drop back to Earth, which is our gateway, would have an express route connection to Microsoft, 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 riding on a backbone by Telco, a government that's providing this service, then you get this benefit of the SES meal network.

But if you're a service provider, not service fighter big like a Telco, but let's say you're building the 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 SES connections. And now 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 I'm thinking whether we're talking about defense 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 in the capability of the cloud provider, the service this far edge. Absolutely. And we have an example of that with the nation of Taiwan. We worked with Microsoft to create 5G bubble where their first responders connected to their Microsoft Azure cloud, which is down in Australia and seven thousand miles away. And it enabled them in 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, handset type service to ultimately with satellite being that back end?

Exactly. And so in the United States, as an example, we see Mio as a very critical component to building out a 5G network. If you're moving to an area that doesn't have the fiber there yet, you can put in 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 cell towers are wiped out in an area, the telephone companies can come in with Mio service and they can restore 5G capability over satellite to that area until the towers are rebuilt.

And this helps with fire, with rescue, with rebuilding. It allows loved ones to connect to home and say, I'm OK. 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 they're end customers. How do they reach out to SES? Like, how do I how do they develop a relationship and say, you know what?

This sounds, Keith, this is exactly what I need. I'm a service provider. I'm looking to partner where I'm an end user organization and I'm looking to consume. How do they develop a relationship? com. There's information in there that tells you how to reach out to us, all the offices around the world. And that's probably the best way to get started. We'd love to work with you and we're very proud of what we do. And basically, I think 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 dot com. We're now a Futurum Group company, though, so you can find us on the Futurum Group website as well. com rather. And then LinkedIn. Obviously, we can have the conversation until then. Talk to you next. CTO Advisor podcast. Thanks, Jim. Hey, thank you, Keith.