Traditional business and operational environments are not designed for satellite’s dynamic operations across space and Earth
Netcracker Technology has announced its Digital Satellite Solution, which it described as a “blueprint for multi-orbit IT” to help satellite operators manage, optimize and monetize their business. According to Netcracker’s Head of Strategy and Portfolio Marketing Susan White, the company’s newest solution addresses the key ways in which satellite communications differs from traditional comms — namely the need for a dynamic and real-time view of service.
Specifically, while recent advancements in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and geostationary (GEO) satellites — including direct-to-device (D2D) capabilities — have opened up new opportunities to bring advanced and affordable communications to remote locations and close mobile coverage gaps, traditional business and operational environments are not designed for satellite’s highly dynamic operations across space and Earth and its complex global customer base.
Netcracker is hoping that its Digital Satellite Solution, which is built on a cloud-native foundation and “deeply embedded with AI,” is the answer to these challenges. “We built a new AI service inventory that continuously rebuilds the topology because of the dynamism involved as the satellite moves through different zones [and] links with different ground stations,” White told RCR Wireless News. “We’re talking thousands of changes a second that have to be made to achieve this, so we leverage AI to build that real-time inventory.” She added that enabling this real-time service view has never really been done before.
“We are continuously building the service topology and that is essential so we can do the next part, which is dynamic SLA management,” she continued. “As the satellites move, these operators create zones of coverage and each zone has different service level objectives … that you need to meet.”
However, the topography, as mentioned previously, is always changing, and this means there must be an “intelligent” way to track the changing SLAs as the conditions change. “You have a constantly changing array of values, so we have a sophisticated way to measure all of that, so if an SLA is breached, you can get the service back on track or make sure that that quality was achieved,” explained White.
Finally, the solution also has end-to-end service automation that runs across multi-domains, which in this case, means space and Earth. “Which has never been done to this complexity,” said White.
Summarizing the value the solution will deliver for satellite operators, White commented: “You get a constant single source of truth, a single pane of glass and you can offer the best service in a cost-effective way.”
Of the state of the satellite industry at large, White shared that because LEO satellites are so much closer to earth than GEO satellites, operators can achieve low enough latency and high enough bandwidth to offer, for the first time, an affordable service that is similar in performance to 5G and fiber. It’s important to note, however, that terrestrial cellular and satellite systems are not at war with each other; in fact, at the satellite industry’s flagship show in March, one of the hottest topics is the emerging convergence between the two, evidenced by AST SpaceMobile’s recent partnerships with AT&T and Verizon.
“It’s about filling the gaps between what we had in existing satellites communications and some of the telco networks we have today,” stated White.
