What to Know About Direct-to-Device Satellite Communications

outubro 26, 2024

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For our next episode of TeleGeography Explains the Internet, we look to the sky.

Our guest is Sal Salamone, Managing Editor of Network Computing magazine. Sal joined me to discuss the emerging market for direct-to-device satellite communications.

As we do with any good explainer, we define the market and then get into specific use cases. Sal walks me through what’s on the horizon as well as what’s driving the general renewed interest in satellite communications.

We have many listeners who’ll be curious to hear what this emerging market means for carriers. We get into that. As well as an overview of the beginning stages of standards and regulations that are taking shape.

Dive into the discussion below.

Greg Bryan: It’s a pleasure to have you. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, because we talked last year at the MEF conference. I’m glad we’ve finally gotten together. And I’m really excited about this topic because it’s one I haven’t hit on the show directly before, so that’s always fun.

Before we do that, Sal, could you give us a brief background on yourself? And then of course, what you do as the managing editor of Network Computing?

Sal Salamone: Sure. So I started out as a physicist and that’s how I got my interest in communications. We did experiments with radar equipment and needed to move a lot of data across the globe; this was pre-internet days, pre-high-speed cable days.

I got very interested in different communication systems and ended up making that a career, writing about them. So that’s how I got into it.

To give you an idea of the timeframe, the types of things I was looking at were very low speed. There were media burst communication systems where you bounce signals off of these microscopic meteors that are always entering the atmosphere and burning up and making an ionized trail. Very esoteric, exotic stuff.

Now, you just hit send and it goes from Massachusetts to Puerto Rico or wherever the labs are and you’re done. But that’s how I got into it and I’ve been writing for a long time on all aspects; I worked for a fiber optics magazine, a fiber to the home magazine—lots of things involving wireless technologies.

And now, at Network Computing, as you just mentioned, I’m the managing editor. We focus on a lot of topics: network management issues, network security. My area is still on the communication side, on, you know, the backbone networks.

What’s going on there is great, a lot of interesting things—things like MEF with NaaS, network-as-a-service. Services like SASE that combine networking with security and connectivity and are offered in a cloud-based way. So a lot going on right now.

And I think one of the big themes we’re seeing is a need for connectivity, but not just a need for it, but how I think, you know, in the old days, everyone looked for high availability. One of our best-performing articles this year, the headline was something along the lines of: forget high availability. Enterprises need always-on services.

Greg: I’ve talked about satellites a fair bit on the show, and I’ve of course talked about wireless. Especially as an enterprise technology on the show, but I haven’t really talked ever about where the two intersect.

So that’s what we’re focusing on today, the sort of direct device market.

Of course, this is a nascent sort of thing in the marketplace and our goal on the show is always to not lose anyone, to keep everybody up with us, and and explain the internet as it were. So let’s just start out very basically with a definition of what directed device satellite services are.

Sal: Yeah, so I think it melds a couple of things that have been going on both in the consumer and the enterprise spaces. I think for years there was talk of machine-to-machine communications. It kind of plays off of that. But we’re seeing it on the consumer side, direct to device.

It’s things like: now almost all the smartphone manufacturers are offering [free] satellite messaging in some emergency situations. Some is with a fee. And then in the enterprise space, it’s more, you know, connecting something in the field that perhaps would have been connected with wireless first.

Listen to the full episode below.