The 5G non-terrestrial network (NTN) market must overcome some big challenges before MNOs can embrace it
SpaceX recently launched its first six Starlink LEOs that are intended to provide direct-to-device (D2D) communications and has since sent and received the first text between mobile devices using T-Mobile’s network spectrum. The company is currently leading the LEOsat pack suggesting it is “uniquely positioned to rapidly scale” even as China preps its own mega-constellations and Amazon Kuiper looks to move beyond two satellites.
However, co-founder and executive director of consultancy Planet Earth Connect Enrico Ottolini said that although the key LEOsat companies do cover a substantial part of the whole 5G service spectrum, their focus on competing with each other is hindering their ability to address the needs of enterprise clients. “They are making a challenging market more difficult,” he said. “Terrestrial network operators want 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) services to provide seamless coverage extension of their existing connectivity solutions.
Geopolitics will force LEOsat operators towards enterprise
Geopolitical tensions have worsened over the last few years. Ottolini believes there is an increasing competition for geopolitical and geoeconomic global dominance between each general faction, especially over regions in the global south that represent a large part of the anticipated future revenues of most LEOsat operators.
China is developing its own LEOsat systems as an alternative to the initiatives from the United States, Europe, and Japan,” he said. “As such, it is likely that China and Russia will leverage their strong relationships with the governments in the global south to favour the market entry of the Chinese system.”
Considering the growing twofold civilian-military use of LEOsats, China’s strong financial and political position, and many developing countries’ energy dependency on Russia, this can make it particularly difficult for LEOsat operators from the Western world to gain regulatory market access for their services in these countries, he added.
If Western LEOsat operators are depending on the global south for their revenue, arguments about terminal and service costs aside, they may be better served entering untapped enterprise markets.
Big barriers
Ottolini said this won’t be straightforward for several reasons. “LEOsat operators have mainly based their services on proprietary solutions,” he said. “Because each company is developing its own solution to compete with rather than complement the rest, this will complicate service consistency for enterprise applications across different complementary LEOsat constellations, and lead to a wide variety of deployment models and architecture for the integration with terrestrial cellular services.”
The reason for this lack of standardisation is the rather limited scope of 3GPP’s Release 17 which Ottolini said should have set the standards for 5G TN/NTN multi-connectivity. “However, it is limited to only transparent satellite access nodes,” he said. “This excludes any regenerative capabilities to compensate in the NTN 5G Core Network and RAN for satellite-related issues such as long propagation delays, large Doppler effects, rain fading and so on.”
As a result, he said, Release 17 will at best facilitate interworking between 5G TNs and NTNs. But that leaves full TN/NTN multi-connectivity for future releases 18, 19, 20 and so on, which will eventually set the required standards from 2026 onward. Given constellations will be launched and become commercially available long before that date, each D2D LEOsat provider will develop and implement its own separate, proprietary, and dedicated Core network and RAN solutions best suited to make their services connect seamlessly with unmodified 5G user equipment.
Can you hear me?
The second, related challenge Ottolini sees is service fragmentation. “The specific 5G frequency bands and satellite design used by the different LEOsat operators put different requirements and limitations on both user equipment and the services,” he said. “Therefore, each of these systems is more suitable to offer services only in a specific part of the whole 5G services spectrum.”
Spreading this globally you see the complete range of LEOsat services is divided among three or more different LEOsat operators, each focusing on a limited part of the whole 5G services spectrum, whereas terrestrial MNOs will typically provide a complete range of service.
Related to fragmentation is the sheer range of LEOsat business models MNOs will need to interact with. Where one LEOsat operator provides its services only as a standalone — without integration with terrestrial 5G services — another operator offers this terrestrial-satellite integration by connecting the mobile network operator’s core networks directly to its satellite RAN. Meanwhile, others propose a generic roaming model. As such, it will be virtually impossible for MNOs and resellers to manage the whole LEOsat service range consistently and efficiently.
Generic roaming is not enough
Ottolini said 5G SA networks will see key differences, both in network slicing solutions as well as in-the-core versus in-the-edge policies used by the different operators – despite the various standards efforts from the likes of TMF and GSMA. “While some of the LEOsat operators propose the generic roaming approach as a solution to offer LEOsat services as an extension of terrestrial service, this cannot guarantee service consistency between terrestrial and satellite 5G networks,” he said. “Nor can it offer the end-to-end quality of service needed for complex business applications across the different networks.”
As these are critical requirements for large-scale enterprise deployments, and essential for the financial feasibility of these new LEO satellite systems, this approach will not work,” he added.
Ottolini believes if these challenges are not resolved, MNOs, system integrators and global enterprises looking to complement their full range of terrestrial 5G services with LEOsat services will have to source the different LEO satellite services from different satellite operators and connect with the specific systems of each of them – the reverse of where the industry should be heading.
“This will be both extremely inefficient and costly, leading to a delay in quick market adoption of LEOsat services by these distribution channels,” he said. “Consequently, this will hinder the LEOsat operators from reaching the economies of scale and obtaining additional revenues from high-value enterprise clients for premium services, both of which are likely necessary to bear the huge costs of their constellations.”
Enrico Ottolini is co-founder and executive director of Planet Earth Connect, an independent consultancy firm and LEOsat/HAPS Network-as-a-Service platform provider.