SES Networks wants its operator customers to be able to forget that it flies a constellation of 70 orbiting communications satellites.
The company provides space-based data networking, used today by mobile operators for backhaul and enterprise VPN; maritime and aviation companies, including cruise ship and passenger airline operators; and government customers, who use SES for drone surveillance, environmental controls, and more.
SES wants operators to be able to connect to their satellite networks using existing management and orchestration tools, and so it's implementing the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) on Microsoft Azure, with the assistance of Amdocs.
I talked with SES CEO JP Hemingway about the company's voyage into the final frontier, and its ambitions to leverage ONAP to go beyond the network of last resort.
Listen to our conversation:
"People used to perceive satellite as a few megabits trickling through. It was expensive, the delay was terrible, and we had to fundamentally change that," Hemingway says. "We absolutely can deliver, not just a few trickling megabits, but we're delivering two gigabits in some cases to some of these cruise ships."
He adds: "When that same ship says, hey, I think I'd like to have a new piece of automation software delivered, I'd like to run a different security protocol, I'd like to enable a new application to my corporate VPN, now that we've got ONAP, we can deliver an NFV application seamlessly down onto the servers at the end of our connectivity points."
To read more about how SES is using ONAP, see: SES Takes ONAP to the Final Frontier
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— Mitch Wagner 


Executive Editor, Light Reading