Gatehouse Satcom

Now we know that Peter prefers cake to the mandatory glass of water at a video interview. ⠀ Peter Mariager was recently named CTO of Gatehouse Satcom, with responsibility for technology across the entire company. That gives our customers and partners one person who sets our technical direction and can explain where it leads. ⠀ In this interview, Peter describes a satellite market that is far more dynamic than five years ago, but still hard to enter, with a high barrier of entry and fragmented technology. "What we at Gatehouse would like to do is to lower that barrier." For new satellite service providers, that means integrating our communication protocol stacks into regenerative architectures that are ready to use, so they have fewer places to shop. ⠀ Five years from now, he expects 3GPP NTN to be baseline technology for much of satellite communication. And he looks forward to true mobility: a phone or satellite terminal that can be switched on anywhere and roam between constellations. ⠀ Watch the full interview below, and stay for the last ten seconds 🍰 ⠀ #5GNTN #NTN #Satcom

A satellite can't get more power or cooling once it's in orbit. So every number in your plan has to fit what it has. Check that before you pick the platform.

A new generation of satellite operators is forming. And so, we have opened a programme called Space Fast Track to make their road to live service faster and easier. Launch costs have dropped over the last decade. The 3GPP standards for non-terrestrial networks are no longer theoretical. Sateliot and Iridium are both bringing standards-based NTN services to market, and our protocol software is part of what they are built on. The device vendors have followed. Satellite connectivity, NB-IoT today and direct-to-device next, is a bigger market than any one operator can serve. We have spoken to enough new entrants to know the engineering is not the mystery. A conformant stack is eighteen months and a team of RF, PHY and protocol engineers, and that is the part nobody has spare. The question is how soon they can have a service in orbit that a customer will pay for, and whose software they can trust to get them there. Gatehouse Satcom has more than 25 years in satellite communications, born in non-terrestrial networks. With this initiative we want to be useful to the new names on the scene. There is plenty of space in, well, space. Over the next six months we will roll out more initiatives under the Space Fast Track programme. The first one is simple. If you are building a satellite business case, bring it to us and we will go through it with you. It does not have to be finished, but it has to be on paper. Some of it is technical, link budgets and power, Doppler and timing. Some of it is the ecosystem around you, which devices and chipsets to count on and which partners you will need. We have done this hundreds of times, which is why it takes an afternoon and not a quarter. Where the plan holds, we will say so. Where the numbers do not add up, better to hear it now than to find out in year two. No obligation. And if it does add up, the next conversation is about how quickly you can be running on a stack that already works. #Satcom #5GNTN #NBIoT #5GNR #SpaceFastTrack

One radio signal. Two 5G NTN service classes. Same platform. We ran 5G NR NTN and NB-IoT NTN concurrently through the same emulated satellite channel. The video shows a composite radio signal carrying both technologies, passed through a RF channel and orbit emulator that applies realistic satellite effects. Both come out the other side and run through our platform, end to end. This is ongoing work in our own lab. We have results from this run, and we will share more as the work progresses. IoT and broadband are usually treated as separate builds, with separate ground infrastructure and separate business cases behind them. Carrying both on one platform makes that a single asset instead of a choice between two markets. It also means the sequencing is yours. An NB-IoT service can go live first, with NR added on the same platform as that side of the ecosystem matures. If you are working on multi-service satellite networks, from the operator, device or integrator side, we would be glad to talk through what we are seeing. #5GNTN #NBIoT #NewRadio #Satcom

Standing up an NTN service means a thousand decisions. The 3GPP protocol stack is one you can buy instead of build. Here is what that gets you.

Choose NB-IoT NTN while NR NTN matures. You can prove your architecture in orbit now, with a real device attaching through your satellite.