Last week, we explored the problems facing Viasat, after it announced it had plans to launch a LEO satellite constellation if it could secure FCC funding. However, the FCC has been making noises about excluding satellite operators from the rural broadband funds, due to their latencies being too high.
This week, Telefónica and Telesat have announced the completion of a test that shows latencies that fall under the FCC broadband definition, which suggest that the FCC is definitely wide of the mark, when it comes to ruling out satellite entirely. What’s more, they suggest that the SpaceX claim of 25ms latencies might be achievable too, although that seems like it could be only in the best-case scenario.
Telesat and Telefónica International Wholesale Services (TIWS) completed the first phase test for Telesat’s new LEO satellite – the first of what will eventually become a full constellation. They found that the roundtrip latency was in the 30ms to 60ms range, which is comfortably under the FCC’s broadband definition requirement, and also a fraction of the 600ms that conventional geostationary satellite broadband is capable of.
Formerly called Telesat Canada, Telesat is headquartered in Ottawa. It is the fourth largest satellite operator in the world, and operates satellite fleets for other customers. It is planning on commercially launching the new Telesat LEO fleet in 2022 and claims it will revolutionize global broadband connectivity when it does so.
The pair said that the test scenarios included high definition video streaming, without interruption; video conferencing, with full synchronicity between audio and video; remote desktop connections; VPN connections without outages or delays; FTP encrypted file transfers of 2GB in both uplink and downlink; and IPSec tunnel encryption without reduction in the link performance.
Now, we are most interested in the bandwidth of the upstream traffic, as geostationary satellites still struggle to do much more than 3Mbps. However, in a very simplistic comparison, if the latency of the LEO connections is 10-20 times better than GEO, could we expect a similar improvement for upstream traffic?
It should be noted that Viasat and SpaceX both do not talk about the upstream speeds.
That may be because they are not seeing much improvement over the GEO capabilities, in the worst-case scenario. Of course, if this were to be the case, the terrestrial fixed, fixed wireless, and even mobile crowd are going to pile on, tearing lumps out of the satellite alternatives.
However, Telefónica told us that it achieved 20Mbps in the testing, admittedly on equipment that is likely more capable than what would be provided in consumer-grade deployments. That is a big step up on GEO capabilities, and if the likes of Telesat can provide even half that upload speed to their end-customers, that will be a big step forward for underserved consumers. Separately, Telesat said it hit a peak upload speed of 72Mbps, using multiple symmetrical carriers, but stressed that it is more focused on enterprise applications, and that reducing jitter and packet loss are higher priorities than raw throughput. This all sounds rather promising.
However, the FCC has seemed opposed to satellite, almost in principal. Ruling it out of the upcoming funding would be missing the wood for the trees. For many consumers in the US, under the FCC mandate, as well as billions in the wider world, there is currently no broadband option available. For many, the choice is dial-up or slow DSL if they’re lucky. Some might be lucky enough to fall under the footprint of a co-operative ISP, but there are not exactly a multitude of choices.
These customers are not worth the capex investments, to most ISPs. Building out core and last mile networks to them would result in either very high consumer prices or very poor returns on their investments, meaning that ISPs are in no rush to provide broadband coverage to those in hard-to-reach places.
Many of these consumers would jump at the chance of 100Mbps downlinnk, which in turn would open up all sorts of new business and service opportunities for consumers in these underserved environments. So, while the downside might be relatively poor upload speed, we feel that most consumers will accept that sort of trade-off. Dowlink of 100Mbps, with maybe 5Mbps up, is still orders of magnitude better than what they can get from the incumbent terrestrial ISP, and in many cases, given what the LEO crowd have been saying, the satellite provision is going to be cheaper too.
To write off the LEO options because of missing the upload speed requirement could prove immensely short-sighted. This hand-wringing could be missing the mark entirely, if it transpires that the LEO providers can exceed the FCC threshold – and especially so if they become competitive with the likes of cable broadband or advanced DSL flavors.
The FCC is moving forward with the first phase of its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which consists of some $16bn in funding. It hasn’t explicitly ruled out satellite providers, but comments from chairman Ajit Pai suggest success is unlikely. The auction begins on October 29, and while it is positioned as ‘technology agnostic,’ the regulator could miss an incredible opportunity to expand its citizens’ access to high speed broadband, in a very cost-effective manner.