It was actually the satellite industry that came to me. After many years in the cellular industry, working in various levels of leadership in R&D and then Sales and Business development, I got the proverbial call to jump into the satellite space (no pun intended). After some years in it, I came to realise that very important problems can be solved by using the right satellite connectivity solution. Also creating some fuel for the passion for this space, is seeing it starting from a niche technology to serve the underserved, to now satellite becoming the cool technology to solve both underserved and served users, up and down the solution pyramid, from consumer broadband access at mass-scale, up to mission critical comms for government and enterprise users over private satellite networks.
Eliminating Single Points of Failure
The key challenge is to provide a modem product that will mitigate some of the biggest obstacles for operating a resilient private satellite network. One of those obstacles is a central hub station in a private mission-critical network results in a single point of network failure, meaning, any failure at the hub station due to equipment malfunction, cyber attack or physical attack, will result in an entire network outage. Another obstacle, with such a centralised architecture that forms into a “Star” network topology, any two sites to communication traversed back and forth via the central hub station, resulting in double hops over the satellite, which doubles the connection cost and latency, regardless of its orbital connection. Our VSATPlus® product line of modems removes both those obstacles, the first being our hub-less architecture eliminates the need for a central hub satellite station, resulting in a no-single-point of failure to ensure continuous network operation. And not requiring a hub, the modems can operate in a mesh topology to enable direct connections between any two ground stations in the private network.
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Our hub-less architecture eliminates the single point of failure to ensure continuous network operation.
Riding the Next Satcom Wave
We allow our team members to hear the customer voice firsthand and unfiltered, so they can more deeply understand what the customer’s most pressing needs are for operating resilient, mission-critical private networks. Private VSAT networks will evolve in step with terrestrial communications networks, seamlessly connecting with them and across multiple orbits. One key enabler to make this happen is our modem becoming virtualized, to be housed both on the ground and in space across platforms.
I humbly ask all you young engineers and tech pros to consider the following: satellite is now the coolest thing to study, and we need you to guide us older satcom-heads, swiftly and safely, on to this next big satcom wave. I got a feeling it will be a lot of fun.
