The business of direct-to-device (D2D) connectivity is somewhere between a launch pad and a stable orbit, which represents real progress compared to six months ago.
But as a panel Tuesday at 6GWorld's conference reminded attendees, both startups and some of the industry's more established operators are continuing to calculate their non-terrestrial-network trajectories.
"We're seeing services start to be tested," said moderator Kelly Hill, executive editor at RCR Wireless, as she nodded to Google's recent move to match Apple's Emergency SOS iPhone feature with emergency satellite messaging on its Pixel phones as well as the Sept. 12 launch of AST SpaceMobile’s first five BlueBird satellites. "We've got satellites going up."
The first panelist to join her onstage, Viasat chairman and CEO Mark Dankberg, concurred, saying, "There's exciting opportunities."
Supply and demand, but in space
But after commending the industry for its initial success in providing basic connectivity to phones, not just new and satellite-optimized models, Dankberg noted that the "very poor" performance of antennas on those handsets could make it difficult to deploy services more advanced than messaging.
He also warned of the risks of congestion in the 1 to 2 GHz bands being eyed for so many NTN services, suggesting that demand for space-based bandwidth would not be isolated to the most rural areas.
"The absolute demand tends to be clustered in the more populous states," Dankberg said, holding up New York as an example where the total number of people who might use satellite connectivity would outstrip the total in Montana, uptake percentages notwithstanding.
The solution to that problem, he continued was an equivalent to open RAN in orbit.
"We believe that we can create open architectures that allow technology insertion but, really important, roaming," Dankberg said. "That should make the economics of implementing these services much more cost-effective."
And by "cost effective" he meant data costs in the same approximate orbit as today’s terrestrial networks. "You won't need to raise airtime prices to manage demand," Dankberg predicted.
He's not alone in forecasting an open, standards-based NTN ecosystem—it's come up at other industry events and pitch decks. However, it did not go over well with one attendee who took advantage of an audience Q&A segment to opine that he didn’t know any terrestrial operators who liked to share spectrum because that prevented them from controlling the user experience.
Reiterating that "the key to lowering those costs is really aggregating spectrum," Dankberg suggested that the limited number of satellite operators capable of providing service worldwide ("there's about three of us that have global spectrum") would make this meeting of the network minds easier.
Compatibility, capacity and convergence?
The second half of this hour-long session brought three more speakers on stage: Intelsat technology and innovation SVP Carmel Ortiz, Northeastern University professor Josep Jornet, and Lynk Global product-management and sales support VP Mahmoud Khafagy. The ensuing conversation further emphasized how NTN is in the first stage of deployment.
Khafagy, for example, touted how Lynk is "backwards compatible with all existing phones," with nine operators now offering connectivity through its first satellites. But that's a messaging-only service right now, with voice and data requiring multiple rocket launches to build out Lynk's constellation. (Along the way, this Falls Church, Virginia, startup will probably also need more rounds of funding fuel).
But he and Dankberg both said the economics of satellite broadband instead of terrestrial towers were undeniable in the most isolated areas. The Viasat executive said that while the company today uses satellites for backhaul to "small towns with thousands of people," direct-to-device connectivity would "allow you to get to places where there's single digits of people."
Ortiz, however, suggested that once Intelsat's satellites can run 5G NR (new radio) natively, they could also serve as a backstop to terrestrial connectivity on devices that would evaluate the performance of both network options and choose the more resilient one during congested times.
Dankberg endorsed this notion of converged networks, especially compared to the current reality of emergency messaging and its demand for dexterous handling of a handset seeking that signal from space.
"It's not as seamless as you can leave it in your pocket," he said. "You may have to point it carefully, wave it around a little bit."
The convergence message, however, then got a little contradiction from Jornet when he endorsed adopting high-band frequencies novel to phones. Having done considerable research has focused on the potential of much higher bands to power 6G networks, he put in a plug for NTN use of frequencies from 100 to 300 GHz—far above the sub-1 GHz bands that Lynk has adopted for what Khafagy called "better propagation characteristics" and because they’re "available everywhere."
"I can focus my power a thousand times better than would happen at the lower frequencies," Jornet said. He suggested those bands would complement lower-band service: "We're trying to add ingredients and let's hope that as a team, we can come up with the best recipe."
The panel ended with multiple speakers accepting the complexity of the task at hand—not only serving up that recipe, but doing so around the world among a diversity of devices and throughout varying atmospheric conditions. Quipped Jornet: "Maybe AI can help with that?"
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