232 - How Is 5G NTN Shaping Long-Term Strategy Across the Satellite Industry?
episode
Constellations - Explore Space Network Technologies with Industry Leaders
28 min
1 speaker
4 chapters
transcribed 29 days ago
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Constellations, the podcast from Kratos. My name is John Gilroy, and I'll be your moderator. Joining me on stage is Blaine Boyton of SES, Andrew Cavalier of ABI Research, and Greg Quiggle of Kratos to unpack how the satellite industry is weaving 5G NTN into long-term strategy, how competitive pressures accelerate. And how early implementations point towards commercial readiness. Gentlemen, ready to jump in? We are. Absolutely. First question, so Andrew, he came the furthest, came from Singapore, so we gotta give you the first question here. Can you set the stage for us regarding five G N T N in the satellite industry? So so what's happening, man?
Absolutely. So it's been a few years since Rail seventeen, right? In twenty twenty two when it was frozen. Um a number of operators have come out looking towards to try to take on this standard, particularly Skylo, right? And devices were certified what two years after the release, right? So it took about two years to commercialization. We're past that now and we see release nineteen has been frozen. So now we now see NRNTN is on the horizon. And that's this is the path towards 6G, right? So now we see a number of operators, big ones, SpaceX just announced recently they're going to be doing NR NTN with their next generation, Starlink Mobile 2, Gen 2, right? Iridium's already said they're coming out doing NBIoT based off of the RHEL 1718 standard, right?
And then we also see some other operators like ASC. Basically posturing about Going into the standard as well. So there's a lot of movement happening. Chipset vendors are moving, uh, adopting the standard into the chipsets and going into commercial devices. And then we see MNOs, right? Deutsche Telecom, T Mobile, going into partnerships with satellite operators to bring these services to the customers. That's in IoT, that's in direct to device for your smartphones. We're seeing commercialization happening. And we're on the road to six G, yes, I could say.
Good good. Blaine, uh how have recent five G N T N standardization updates and customer need influence your long term network strategy?
So there's been um good progress I would say in reducing some of the 5G NTN components to practice. You can actually buy um at least one system on a chip today that that could be integrated into an NTN capable modem. And you know what our our vision in the long run is is um For me, a bit of back to the future. So I I came from the GoGo acquisition, GoGo Inflight, right? And GoGo operated an an air-to-ground network based on EVDOB. So the core handled mobility management, subscriber management, all of these functions that frankly are difficult. And when Gogo made the shift. from air to ground to satellite. We were dumbfounded with the amount of work. I mean it's very complicated.
What is 5G NTN and why is it important for the satellite industry?
We had to go rebuild software to do very basic things that the evidob core in nineteen ninety nine or early two thousands was handling for us, right? So Uh we're excited to see the convergence. We're we're excited to to simplify really our our network deployment by relying on these massive scale cores that are frankly very good at mobility management, very good at subscriber and call control and basic functions that That the satellite industry had to go build themselves. And every time we have a system boundary or a platform boundary, we have to build those functions differently. So if I use three or four different uh legacy platform providers, I probably have three or four different implementations of how to handle a call or how to generate a billing record.
Yep. Um The convergence for us represents a simplification opportunity. And then the ability in the future to jump on the massive scale. manufacturing of 5G by leveraging the chips that we that we believe will become available will provide us a a great opportunity to reduce the cost at the UE. And and those are two big pain points in satellite. The UE is complicated, expensive, right? And then the network management piece has just been a bear. Yep.
Yeah. No, Greg, a lot of strategy questions here because we're in an incipient stage of this whole revolution here.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–3:13
2
What is 5G NTN and why is it important for the satellite industry?
3:13–10:11
3
How have recent 5G NTN standard updates shaped long‑term strategies at SES?
10:11–14:07
4
What are the biggest technical challenges when moving from air‑to‑ground to satellite networks?
14:07–27:57
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Constellations - Explore Space Network Technologies with Industry Leaders
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230 - Which System Wins, When Comparing Virtual Ground With Traditional Hardware ROI?