[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]
By Brett Haan
Real Clear Wire
Satellite communications have always been a great alternative when there is no alternative. The trouble is, they’ve also always been slow, expensive, and finicky. Getting online on a long-haul flight, for example, can be a frustrating mess. But if you need to send that email or document, it’s better than nothing.
Even important advances like Elon Musk’s Starlink have their issues. Like its predecessors, it’s a great choice if you have no other choice. But for almost everyone else, it has its drawbacks.
One forthcoming satellite constellation is bidding to address those shortcomings and bring forward a truly revolutionary satellite communications network—faster than fiber, truly global, and as secure as anything on the market.
Rivada Networks calls it the “OuterNET.” To understand why it’s revolutionary, it helps to look at the weaknesses of existing offerings.
Every satellite constellation in existence today uses what’s called “bent pipes.” In short, they bounce the signal off a satellite—and straight back down to Earth, where it is sent through a gateway and onto the same Internet backbone as nearly everything else. It’s a very long way to travel that “last mile” between your home or office and the public Internet. Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon’s forthcoming Kuiper—all are built this way.
The OuterNET is being built differently. Rivada’s orbital network will serve in effect as a second Internet backbone in space, capable of routing traffic at gigabit speeds from one satellite to another, with no need for a gateway on Earth until the data reaches its destination. That matters not just for speed and security, but for coverage, too. We’ve all seen the images showing how many new satellites are in space, and many of us have seen the trains of satellites tracking across the night sky toward their final orbits. But with most other LEO constellations, having a satellite overhead doesn’t matter unless that satellite can also see a gateway on the ground.
The Rivada system is gateway-less. Instead of beaming your communications straight back to a ground station, the whole constellation is interconnected with optical laser links. That means that if there’s a satellite above, you can get connected. And because its satellites move in a single synchronized shell in polar orbits, there will always be a satellite overhead when the constellation is fully deployed.
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It’s also being built to be 100 times faster than current low-Earth orbit constellations. But this is not the home broadband connection of your dreams. It’s a wholesale network built for enterprises and governments. Like the original Internet backbone, it’s not something designed for consumers to connect to directly. Instead, it will provide backhaul to wireless networks, in-flight connectivity, maritime communications, and the like. It’s the fiber optic network for where there is no fiber, or for those who don’t trust or can’t afford to risk using the terrestrial Internet backbone.
But just because you may never use it directly, that doesn’t mean you won’t notice it. Today’s connectivity is often limited by the availability of fiber or other high-speed links to push the edges of our networks. The dawn of an era in which there is effectively “fiber in the sky” everywhere will open up applications that most of us haven’t even dreamed of—because ubiquitous connectivity wasn’t possible or was too expensive. In-flight entertainment that doesn’t stink is just the tip of the iceberg. Just as the expansion of fiber in the 1990s and 2000s vastly increased data speeds and led to the cloud-computing revolution, a ubiquitous, global high-speed backbone will help connect hard-to-reach places, facilitate remote work, expand cloud computing and storage, and set off a new wave of innovation in communications technology.
Satellite communications, in short, is finally coming into its own. Buckle up.
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