Companies such as Iridium and Viasat handle highly specialized public and private sector workloads. SpaceX’s Starlink is perhaps the most recognizable player in the space-based comms race. Starlink aims to provide affordable Internet access to everyone, anywhere in the world, and its service has grown rapidly over the past four years, with more than 3,000 satellites in orbit. 500,000 subscribers From 2019 onwards. It has clearly demonstrated its influence, reach and flexibility as a communications network helping Ukraine resist Russian aggression.
Low-Orbit Earth Satellite and SD-WAN Alliance
The virtues of satellite services are clear: with widespread coverage on our planet, it is conceivable that one day every square inch will be covered. From an environmental perspective, they are almost entirely solar powered, and can be more cost-effective for communication over long distances.
As a WAN access technology however, satellite communication experiences its fair share of constraints. For example, because signals must travel through space and back to Earth, latency degradation is the inevitable physics of performance.
Additionally, some providers rely on packet manipulation, such as queuing, to deliver a high quality of service. However, when it is combined with business-focused overlay technology — such as SD-WAN — packet manipulation can hurt network performance.
Fortunately, many providers have developed ways around this. Starlink’s technology exclusively uses low-Earth orbit systems that operate physically close to Earth, greatly reducing the latency and associated heavy processing demands of conventional satellites. This makes it possible to easily integrate space-based access paths into existing terrestrial SD-WAN networks.
The result: low-latency and high-bandwidth communications capable of reaching the most remote locations on the planet, where the Internet was previously inaccessible. The idea is that anywhere you can see the sky, you can have Internet access.