Verticals and Horizontals: Satellite’s Expanding Marketplace
by Martin Jarrold
London, UK, September 4, 2013--The 6th Annual Oil & Gas Communications South East Asia: Evolving the ‘Big Data’ Digital Oilfield for Offshore & Deep Water conference, the 19th event in GVF-EMP’s overall global series, will take place on 19th & 20th November 2013 at the InterContinental Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The conference backdrop is the continuing priority of Southeast Asian nations and of countries across East Asia in respect of oil & gas industry policy, which remains, as for a number of years, tightly centered on ensuring national energy security and the injection of measures for continued national, and by extension, pan-regional, economic stimulus.
To slow hydrocarbons import dependency (and to boost energy security and maximize the potential for accelerated economic growth) the region's countries exhibit continuing interest in meeting as much domestic oil & gas demand as possible from home sources. Asia’s offshore energy industry does have a significant enough potential to deliver on the need for assured domestically-sourced oil & gas supplies – on the basis of both continuing production from already operating fields and from the accelerated exploitation of newly discovered reserves.
In the shorter term, Asia’s offshore exploration and production (E&P) environment will continue to be characterized by shallow water developments, and consequently CapEx on pipelines and fixed platforms will account for the most substantial proportion of the regional new infrastructure spend. However, in the longer term, in order to fully exploit the region's reserves, fresh oil frontiers are being opened up in deeper and more remote waters, and also in emergent hydrocarbons-production regions, such as the Philippines and Myanmar. Such developments are expected to greatly increase demand for subsea units and floating production units.
High Throughput Satellites 2013: The Game-Changer in Action – The London Roundtable will take place at the Strand Palace Hotel on 5th & 6th December 2013, delivering the third program in this GVF-EMP conference series. The Roundtable Series continues to offer a highly topical and timely platform for discussion, just as more satellite operators are bringing HTS capabilities to orbit and to the market.
Today’s satellite market is undergoing major quantitative shifts. This is illustrated by the fact that only 10 years ago, a good year for the satellite communications industry was a terminal deployment total of some 80,000 units worldwide, whereas today, in just one country, one service provider is now installing 30,000 terminals per month. Such metrics exemplify the increase in global broadband requirements, which are expected to continue to accelerate, driven by the globalization of business, the penetration of wireless communications, the need to be connected at all times, by demand driven by bandwidth-hungry mobility applications, the convergence of data and video due to the growing presence of smart phones in emerging regions, and requirements for broadband on commercial and government aircraft and on cruise and merchant vessels.
Similarly, the satellite market is undergoing significant qualitative shifts – shifts that are arising from moves towards high throughput satellite (HTS) technologies and services. More than half of the world's dozens of satellite operators have either ordered or plan to order high capacity satellites to serve the 14 million households and 50% of enterprise terminals that are predicted to be using high capacity platforms by as soon as 2020. Many HTS satellite payloads, including the first spacecraft of new high throughput satellite constellations, have already been launched.
HTS is not necessarily complex, but is often misunderstood. Of course, a high throughput satellite is, essentially, a spacecraft with many times the throughput of a traditional FSS satellite for the same amount of allocated frequency on orbit. It takes advantage of frequency reuse and multiple spot-beams to increase throughput and reduce the cost
red. The quantitative and qualitative shifts referenced here have prompted questions about HTS, questions addressing the nature of high capacity and throughput levels, changes in pricing metrics, changes in the detail of service level agreements, and the capabilities of new-entrants to the value-added reseller (VAR) markets, as well as questioning the differences in, and relative merits of, high throughput technologies – variously using C band, Ku Band, or Ka band – in delivering various types of applications.
It is the misunderstandings, and these, and other, questions which High Throughput Satellites 2013: The Game-Changer in Action will explore, correct, and seek to answer in depth.
I intend to explore more details of these upcoming programs in future columns. For now I would like to point to a major innovation scheduled for 2014.
Additionally announced by GVF-EMP is Connectivity 2014: Air, Water, Surface & Rail, which will also take place in London, 11th-12th February 2014. This event will look at being connected to the Internet, whenever you want, wherever you are, wherever you’re going to, and however you’re getting there, with fast broadband data speeds.
Being “connected” as above, has become a universal mantra in the service delivery goals and user expectations of today’s digital telecommunications marketplace. In the metropolitan workplace and in the urban or suburban home, the multiple-tens of Mbps service has become commonplace with the deployment of fixed fiber-based infrastructures by telecoms service providers. But, increasingly, for an ever-growing proportion of an ever-more demanding user base, this is not enough, particularly as the user-to-device/terminal relationship continues its migration away from interfacing with desktop/laptop PCs with local hard drive data storage and towards interfacing with tablets and smartphones with increasing volumes of data storage in the Cloud. This is a migration which places an overwhelming emphasis on the opportunity for Internet connectivity and access to multimedia services which meet the seemingly insatiable demand for increasingly video-based enterprise and social media applications, while the user is entirely mobile, whether pounding the urban street, taking a country stroll, riding a train, flying on a plane, or taking a trip across the sea.
This seamless connectivity expectation, and the objective of universalizing a seamless connectivity experience which goes way beyond the practical and commercially-sustainable geographical boundaries of today’s 3G and 4G wireless networks, whether over public or private networks, is something that, at the practical deployment level, can only be achieved with a combination of different wireless telecommunications/broadband access technologies – a combination that will increasingly engage the most mobility-enhancing and nomadic communications technology of all, satellite.
Connectivity 2014: Air, Water, Surface & Rail will examine some of the key issues, technological developments, and market trends that feature on the path to a universal connectivity ecosystem, with particular, though not exclusive, reference to the latest developments in the satellite communications marketplace which are focused around the launch of high throughput satellite payloads into orbit. These payloads have already changed the paradigm of satellite communications capabilities in the realms of the satellite-only connectivity solution, but are also bringing a vastly enhanced dynamic to the wider realms of the satellite+terrestrial hybrid solution – solutions used in the corporate, enterprise, government, military, consumer, and other, sectors.
One key theme of the conference will center on the future of mobile backhaul. Satellite networking has always been an imperative for extending the typical service area of terrestrial cellular wireless systems, and connectivity for 2G/GSM voice and SMS applications, in many parts of the world, has been built on the foundation of backhaul over satellite. Now with those parts of the world migrating to 3G – and looking forward to 4G – we should ask, “What does 4G hold in store for mobile backhaul?”
Mobile network operators (MNOs) want new, innovative backhaul architectures that are robust and flexible enough to accommodate shifting traffic loads on cell sites without massive bandwidth over-provisioning. Importantly, MNOs are looking at the segmenting of macro-cells into smaller (femto-, pico-) cells, a trend presenting new challenges for the satellite backhaul vendor whose next-generation backhaul solutions must be more robust as well as high-speed.
Another key theme will examine the technologies used to bring earth stations on vehicles/mobile platforms (ESVs/ESOMPs) – whether they be rail, in-flight, or at sea – and the associated practicalities of driving RoI from solution deployments across train networks, fleets of aircraft, and cruise liners.
‘The Marriage of Mobility & Web 2.0’ will be a further theme to be examined in the context of asking “What will the Satellite-Cloud Interface look like?” The Cloud brings together different technologies – broadband networks, virtualization, Web 2.0 interactivity, time sharing, and browser interfaces – each of them significant advances in their own right, but all the more powerful in combination, and thus the Cloud is now fundamentally changing the way organizations use IT. The communications networks underpinning today’s distributed computing are not only fast, and not only getting faster, but the rate at which they are getting faster is itself speeding-up, creating opportunities for Cloud implementation to bring higher organizational performance, greater flexibility, and savings on costs.
So, what are the strengths and weaknesses inherent in current and developing satellite technologies as far as providing access to The Cloud is concerned? In posing this question, the conference objective is not to engage in a satellite-versus-terrestrial argument – particularly given the long-established trend of hybridized communications networks comprising satellite and terrestrial wireless technologies. Rather the objective is to identify exactly where the unique nature of satellite communications can contribute to the greater functionality, and reliability, and ubiquity, and connectivity to the Cloud, not only for the high-density metropolis of the globe’s most developed markets, but also for the remote communities of the world’s emerging and developing economies and societies.
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications is another key connectivity focus, and the interface and synergy of M2M communications and satellite communications will comprise part of the conference dialog.
Naturally, this dialog must begin with at least a nod to immediate future-history, noting the longer-term significance of transitioning to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). With the ever-increasing number of devices being connected to the Internet, and the consequent need for more IP addresses than the current IPv4 protocol is able to accommodate, the use of a 128-bit IP address permits more than 7.9×1028 times as many addresses as IPv4. But, why begin with this passing mention of IPv6? Well, because it is IPv6 which will bring on the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), and it is the IoT which will be the ultimate realization of a future universal M2M environment which will far exceed the potential boundaries and limited scope of even the greatest reach of the present day M2M environment.
It is the IoT which will create a dynamic network of billions of wireless identifiable ‘things’ communicating with one another, bringing ubiquitous computing, and integrating the digital world and the physical world. More concretely, improved sensor device capabilities will facilitate business logic at the edges of networks as decision-making is based on real-time readings from sensors that are used to monitor pretty much anything and everything. Globally, satellite M2M is growing fast, and the aggregated target markets make its potential for the satellite industry very important.
The conference program will also touch on such connectivity issues as: Merging Broadband Satellite & Wireless into a Unified Value Chain; Satellite Broadband, Wireless & the Digital Citizen; Digital Citizen to Retail Consumer & m-Payer; BYOD – Connectivity across the Employment-Leisure Divide; Military Comms-on-the-Move/Comms-on-the-Pause.
For more information on all of the above please contact the Series organizers’. Their contact details are, with GVF, me at martin.jarrold@gvf.org, and with EMP, Paul Stahl at paul.stahl@uk-emp.co.uk.
Details of all the events can be accessed by following the individual event links from www.uk-emp.co.uk/.
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Martin Jarrold is Director of International Programs of the GVF. He can be reached at martin.jarrold@gvf.org
