Showcasing the Art of Possible —
the “SATCOM+5G Anywhere”
Catalyst Project

While these examples demonstrate the increasing relevance and appetite for SATCOM + 5G based connectivity solutions, they also speak to some interesting customer experience and operational challenges for operators and solution providers. For example, consider a natural disaster scenario where relief agencies and government departments must rapidly deploy first responders to the impacted location. The sooner the agencies can put boots on the ground, the quicker they can begin rescue operations and potentially save lives.

It is essential to achieve the speed, coordination, and simplicity to fulfil the time-sensitive need for emergency service deployment. Customers shouldn’t be concerned about designing these complex services and initiating separate individual orders from separate providers with a swivel chair approach. Service providers must find a simple, elegant, and agile way to empower these agencies to order, deploy, provision, and configure SATCOM + 5G services in time for the rescue staff to use when they arrive.

The alternative would be to pre-order and pre-provision the service. In other words, the operator must reserve the SATCOM capacity, 5G network resources, and the physical components such as the cell on wheels, waiting to be deployed as soon as a disaster strikes. However, it would be impossible to predict how much capacity and other resources are to be reserved ahead of time. Instead, these decisions would depend on the scope and scale of the impacted location, number of devices, bandwidth and latency needs, and more. Nevertheless, government regulations may mandate operators to reserve some level of basic services for emergency use such as natural disasters and, to be fair, in the absence of a viable agile and on-demand alternative, it may be the only practical way of delivering critical comms services in disaster zones. However, this could all be about to change.

At the recently concluded Digital Transformation World (DTW) conference in Copenhagen, an innovation project titled ‘SATCOM+5G Anywhere’ set out to showcase how customers can browse, order, and provision SATCOM+5G offers at the click of a button through a simple and frictionless self-service interface. The project team consisted of key operators and vendors in the SATCOM and Telco industry who laid out the objectives stated below.

David Villegas, Director of Digital Architecture at SES, said, “The combination of SATCOM and 5G presents a game changing opportunity for the industry to deliver new revenue stream but more importantly it enables us to make a meaningful impact to human lives. In this catalyst, we wanted to show how we can enable organizations providing emergency response to natural disasters to get the deployed teams connected anywhere and anytime with standard 5G devices at speed through an AI enabled Marketplace, without having to bother about the technicalities of Satellite Communications and 5G”.

Dr. Amina Boubendir, Head of Research and Standardisation at Airbus Defense and Space, stated she wanted the project to “demonstrate the value of convergent SATCOM and 5G solutions for global coverage and reliability using TMF ODA-based IT management leveraging intelligent intent- and catalog-driven marketplaces and automated multi-technology orchestration systems.”

Walter Mellett, Director, Technology Services Delivery, wanted the project to “showcase seamless decomposition of a unified intent enabled product offer that orchestrates provisioning and activation across non-terrestrial and terrestrial networks using TMF APIs. This would be an essential enabler of customer experience required for success in the marketplace.” CSPs such as Bell Canada can play an important role as a partner in bringing this solution to market, especially as a provider of the Private 5G network, including the cell on wheels.

From these project objectives, a few common themes emerged:

• Simplify how SATCOM + 5G products are packaged and offered to customers.
• Offer a catalog-driven marketplace-based fully digital order to provisioning experience.
• Perform intent-based provisioning and multi-domain orchestration across SATCOM and 5G domains.
• Use TMF ODA standards to achieve interoperability and solution scale.
• Enable relief organizations to focus more on rescue operations and not worry about designing and ordering connectivity.