Is interoperability coming together for space systems?

Here’s a good bit from Ben Hilburn of Microsoft Azure talking about examples of interoperable standards on the Constellation Podcast:

Taking perhaps a more recent example, Ethernet’s been around for a while, I’d point to the 5G community, ORAN. ORAN is short for open radio access networks. And the short story there is, in previous generations of cellular, the cellular operators were buying monolithic systems from the equipment providers, right? So kind of going back to the example in the previous question, you asked me, John, they have to buy the radio and the modem and the processing all from a single vendor. And that was really limiting what the operators could do.

It was limiting acquiring new systems, upgrading systems, right? It introduced additional complexity into the maintenance of systems, and as they were putting together 5G, there was kind of this industry wide, “We’re tired of this. This doesn’t make sense anymore. We need an interoperable standard so that we can just buy a unit from the company that builds the best radio for my specific purpose and by the processing from a different company that builds the best processing for my specific purpose.” Right? And that industry has really rallied around ORAN and is fundamentally shaping the direction of 5G. And it’s used both commercially and in government.

And a lot more from Stuart Daughtridge of the Digital Intermediate Frequency Interoperability (DIFI) Consortium:

…digital transformation is going to have huge impacts across the entire industry. So it probably best way to answer that is to give a couple of examples. The first example I’ll talk about is one that’s already happened. And that’s basically that it’s enabled ground system as a service for the earth observation market.

As little as five to 10 years ago, if you’re putting up an EO satellite, you had to consider building out your own ground infrastructure, which would require significant capital expenditure, as well recurring operations costs. But now, with the availability of software modems and cloud compute capabilities, it’s enabled an entire ground system as a service industry that can provide better coverage, excellent performance, and even helps get your data turned into products faster than custom-built ground systems, all for a very nominal pay-as-you-go pricing model. And they’re able to do that because they’re able to amortize the costs of the system across multiple satellite operators. And this is significantly a change. The cost structure required to start a earth observation satellite business. So it’s really had a huge impact on that part of the industry.

Another example is with respect to ground system architectures. If you look at the basic architecture of a satellite ground system at the block diagram level, it really hasn’t changed much since the late 1960s. I mean, I joined the industry in the mid-1980s, and I remember when I joined the industry, I was given a book that showed how ground systems were built that were from the mid-1970s. And if I pulled up that book now and I pulled out a block diagram of a satellite ground system from, from that book, it would look basically the same as most satellite ground systems that are being built today.

And so at the architectural level, now each of those blocks have advanced massively in the last 40, 50 years, but at the block diagram architecture level, it basically looks identical. So with a digital infrastructure where you digitize once near the antenna, as close to the antenna, as you can, it enables a multitude of new architectures. And as you’re able to use general compute and IP routing to place your L band plumbing and your signal processing, you can disaggregate your architecture and optimize it for the service you’re providing.

There’s a lot more I could talk about on that topic but let me go to a third example. And the third example is the impact on remote terminals. Right now, remote terminals are somewhat built around the modems that they integrate with. And that’s because modems come from different suppliers and they don’t come in a standard size, shape, or with standard interface points. But in the future, terminals will not come with modems. What they’ll come with is generic compute packages, and the modem will be a software application that can be loaded into the generic compute along with other applications.

So, if you think about what that means, it has dramatic impacts. So if you’re the terminal supplier, it greatly simplifies your offerings since you won’t need a different model antenna for each modem. If you’re the terminal buyer, it greatly expands your supply chain because now any terminal can be compatible with any modem. But maybe most important of all, is to think about the terminal user. They can now load up any modem they need and connect the terminal to any satellite or any network that’s available with that same terminal. So you consider the flexibility that creates and then consider what if the terminal could be a flat panel antenna that could support multiple beams. That just adds a whole ‘nother dimension of that flexibility.