SESがOrbitからSpace WANを発表

グローバルな衛星通信事業者SESは今週、南スーダンを拠点とするサービスプロバイダーRCS CommunicationがSD-WANプラットフォームを展開したことを発表しました。Global satellite operator SES this week announced South Sudan-based service provider RCS Communication had deployed its SD-WAN platform. RCS is SES’s first SD-WAN customer, said Mark Bieberich, VP of portfolio and segment marketing at SES. However, this isn’t your typical SD-WAN deployment. RCS won’t be reselling SES’s Versa-based SD-WAN platform. Instead, the service provider and long-time SES customer will be using SD-WAN to enhance and fortify its internet backhaul. SES’s SD-WAN enables customers, particularly those in remote or developing parts of the world, to use its geostationary or medium Earth orbit satellite constellations as WAN links. According to Bieberich, this is particularly useful for telecommunications companies that are building out fiber or other terrestrial networks to maintain service level agreements. In this case, RCS had been using SES’s satellite constellations to provide service to nonprofit organizations, embassies, and businesses in Juba, South Sudan’s capital since 2014. However, as fiber networks started to become more widely available in South Sudan, RCS needed a way to roll out fiber while continuing to ensure the same quality of service to customers. By using SES’s SD-WAN offering, RCS can dynamically route traffic over satellite uplinks and or local fiber, Bieberich explained. This “gives them a variety of benefits. First, they can scale incrementally with application-level intelligence. This means they can economize on the bandwidth they have and they have a built-in resiliency measure.” Flippie Odendal, managing director of RCS, said in a statement that “SES Networks’ SD-WAN service has met RCS’s requirements and direction of moving towards intelligent, software-defined services that will enable us to dynamically react to evolving market conditions and scale whenever needed.” RCS’s use of the SES SD-WAN platform is typical of how the satellite operator expects customers will use the service. “The primary use case of SD-WAN for SES customers is to enable a more intelligent multi-access service,” Bieberich said. “For example, we might have a telco customer that has our existing satellite connectivity today, but once they use it with a fiber connection or want to use it with an additional satellite connection we deploy SD-WAN on their premises. However, SES is also thinking about SD-WAN in a more traditional sense, though the company won’t be targeting the average enterprise. Instead, SES is going after large enterprises that do work in remote parts of the world where connectivity may be limited or non-existent. In the case of the latter, SES’s medium Earth orbit satellites can provide one WAN link, while its Geosynchronous satellite cluster can provide redundancy. “The telco and mobile network operator market is certainly a key segment in which we are addressing opportunities with SD-WAN, but we do have many other segments that we address where there’s a lot of interest. No.1 would be our global government,” Bieberich said, adding that SES is also looking at energy companies operating in the oil and gas industry. Anyone who has used satellite internet knows that latency and bandwidth can often be a bit of a problem. While satellite latency tends to be higher compared to terrestrial networks, Bieberich explains that SES’s medium Earth orbit constellations have reduced the latency substantially. “The advantage of SES is we have a multi-orbit fleet,” he said. “We operate more than 50 geosynchronous satellites, and on those of course the latency is quite high, but we do also have a medium Earth orbit constellation that provides our customers with the kind of latency that they could expect from fiber-based services.” Using these constellations, Bieberich claims SES can achieve latency performance of 150 milliseconds. And while latency has improved, so has bandwidth. “The bandwidth rates, we can achieve with medium Earth orbit, are also comparable to a lot of fiber-based services,” he said. SES has already trialed multi-gigabit services for use on cruise ships, and the company is consistently delivering multiple-hundred megabit services for existing customers, he explained. Beyond latency and bandwidth concerns, Satellite connectivity isn’t without challenges. For one, these medium Earth orbit constellations require tracking antennas rather than the fixed dish arrangements typical of geosynchronous satellites. To address this, SES worked with industry partners to develop this hardware to minimize disruptions. Another challenge somewhat unique to satellite is called rain fade. This phenomenon causes signal losses due to the absorption of signals by atmospheric effects like rain, snow, or ice. “Our [medium Earth orbit] constellations operates in the KA-band, and when we first deployed we had certain mitigation for rain fade,” Bieberich said. “But those have advanced quite a bit over the past six years, and we’re now at the point where the reliability of our service has improved dramatically.” SES is steadily working to expand its satellite fleet. Late last summer, the company announced its 03b mPower communications system would launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2021. This system is expected to deliver 10 times great throughput than current systems. “That system is designed to deliver multiple gigabits per endpoint,” Bieberich said, adding that the constellation can scale to provide more than a terabit of capacity system-wide. The rocket will place seven high-throughput, low-latency satellites, each capable of generating thousands of electronically-steered beams that can be adjusted to serve customers around the globe. The satellite constellation will join the 20 older O3b satellites already in medium Earth orbit.