December 13, 2023
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — In today’s connected world, it is rare to find interoperability between satellite and terrestrial networks. The most common analogy to describe the situation is that the different connectivity players don’t speak the same language.
Given the potential $35 billion in revenue opportunities for the convergence of satellite communications and global telecommunications by 2035, there is growing recognition that the space sector will need to learn to speak using terrestrial standards—not the other way around.
“The language that a lot of enterprises are talking today is Carrier Ethernet service,” said Daniel Bar-Lev, MEF Vice President of Strategic Programs. “What we’ve seen is more and more satellite players saying, ‘We want to be capable of delivering Carrier Ethernet service—or at least letting that service run effectively over our satellite networks.’ That’s that universal language.”
MEF is a global industry association whose membership represents top service and technology providers across telecommunications and data services. The organization began over 20 years ago with standards for Carrier Ethernet, the protocol for high-speed, carrier-class Ethernet services. That widely-used protocol defines standardized packet access to the internet and uses common Ethernet interfaces to support interoperability among network operators, service providers, vendors and customers.
Rather than offering specialized connectivity services in megahertz or MODCOD, there is a shift in the satellite industry to adopt standard definitions and interfaces used by terrestrial players. As the first GEO operator to achieve MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet certification, Intelsat is keen on the advantages of standardized services. Intelsat Vice President of Systems Architecture and Innovation Sunil Gottipati explained that product and service parity with terrestrial operators is an important benefit of MEF certification, such that satellite links become seamless to customers and other providers in the connectivity ecosystem.
“They don’t have to think of satellite as anything different,” said Gottipati. “We’re a part of the broader telco ecosystem and that is how we look at ourselves.”
How Satellite Became a Part of MEF
Currently, several satellite players are members of MEF, including G&S Satcom, iDirect, Intelsat, Kratos, Rivada Space Networks, SES, Telesat and others. However, only a small handful are MEF-certified.
The involvement of satellite companies in MEF started around 2018 when Intelsat approached the organization with the idea of establishing a standard class of service for Carrier Ethernet over satellite. At that time, Intelsat had spent nearly a decade developing a global unified network based on an IP MPLS core to interconnect teleports with terrestrial customers, such as internet service providers and mobile network operators. As that work progressed, there was growing interest in IP and Ethernet services and standardization of those services over satellite, which led to MEF.
“When you look at the MEF standards, the performance specifications … were really geared toward terrestrial providers,” said Gottipati. Latency, in particular, was an issue for non-terrestrial operators.
Intelsat then began work on an amendment to establish a new performance tier for Carrier Ethernet over satellite-based networks. In 2021 the forum released MEF 23.2.2, its first specification for Class of Service (CoS) parameters to differentiate satellite network traffic.
Adapting to terrestrial standards has required a significant investment of resources and time and a big challenge for satellite operators, according to Gottipati, has been moving supply chains toward standardization.
“We keep encouraging our vendors to become standards compliant and get away from proprietary notations of waveforms and protocols,” said Gottipati. “That’s really the biggest barrier to standardization in the satellite world, the proprietary nature of the hardware and software that’s used in these networks.”
Intelsat is currently working with Kratos, a MEF-certified vendor, to enable satcom services to run in a standardized way to terrestrial partners. “We didn’t make up our own interfaces or our own definitions of what a connectivity service should look like,” said Markus Eslitzbicher, Director of Product Management at Kratos, who led the MEF certification process. “We speak MEF language that is familiar immediately to any telecom. And that’s a massive reduction in the friction, the overhead and the complexity of interconnecting terrestrial systems and satcom systems.”
Reducing Complexity and Avoiding Market Fragmentation
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Read the full article: https://www.kratosspace.com/constellations/articles/mef-finding-a-common-language-for-satellite-and-terrestrial-connectivity
