In this interview, we're joined by John-Paul Hemingway, Chief Strategy Officer at SES, a leading global connectivity solutions provider with over 70 satellites in orbit.
John-Paul reveals what he is up to at MWC, where SES is showcasing its latest satellite-enabled solutions across geostationary, medium earth, and low earth orbits. He dives into the unique strengths of each orbital regime, from the broad coverage and high throughput of geostationary satellites to the low latency and high performance of MEO and LEO constellations.
Want to hear more from SES? Tune in now!
Alejandro Pinero
All right, well welcome back here to Fierce Network. I'm Alejandro Pinero, and here we are at the MWC Barcelona at the beautiful SES stand, and I'm joined by JP Hemingway, chief Strategy Officer at SES. Welcome. Thanks for joining us here at Fierce Network.
John-Paul Hemingway
Well Alejandro, welcome to our stand and can't wait to talk about some of the things we're going to show to our customers this week.
Alejandro Pinero
Absolutely. And of course we have this beautiful backdrop, the stand. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're talking about and what you're showing your partners and customers at MWC Barcelona?
John-Paul Hemingway
Yes, absolutely. So of course there's some technology pieces to this, right? We're going to be showing off the latest generations of our satellite technology. We operate over 70 satellites in orbit. Some of those are geostationary, so obviously they've been around for a while. The technology has really moved on. Now we can provide great services from geostationary by providing coverage to huge swathes of the Earth. We are also showing off our medium Earth orbit satellites, and more importantly, how those two things work together. So, working with the right satellite for the right application.
Second point, probably more important though, is our customers. We'll be showing some of the customer projects we've done such as with CNT in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands in particular. We've recently connected them and they're predicting a 10% increase in GDP as a result of the connectivity to the islets. And we’ve connected them in a very environmentally way. No cables going to them under their protected sea life. So it is a really interesting project. Then in geostationary, we've done some amazing projects, like the thousands of schools we're connecting in Colombia and seeing how we can make a real difference there to literally thousands of sites. So it’s great to see what our customers are doing with this technology for real digital transformation.
And then third, I'll discuss working with folks like NTT and Microsoft to do digital twins of ships and oil rigs. Looking at IoT data collection and how we can bring that over a mobile edge compute, running things like private 5G and providing that to rural areas for agricultural needs or maybe digital oil fields. So, looking at technology, customers and then some really interesting partner solutions that are end-to-end.
Alejandro Pinero
And speaking about those customers, now you've mentioned a few of those use cases or deployments already. What are some of the challenges that they're bringing up? Have they changed over time? Are you still getting some of the same questions and what are you hearing out here in Barcelona?
John-Paul Hemingway
Yes, well some of the things remain constant. Typically, satellite can reach things that other technologies can't reach. Fiber of course is getting really ubiquitous, but it's got so far to go. So clearly designing solutions that can be operated in austere environments, remote environments, what does that mean for us? It means really robust equipment. For example, we've got a single antenna solution over here instead of pairs of antennas. The service needs to be super resilient. Again, you don't want things going wrong if you're in a high production environment, in a digital oil field or a digital mine that's in a remote area. Resilience is very important.
The last thing I'd say is performance. The world of thinking satellite is the last resort, and it only has a few megabits trickling through and it's got huge delay. That's gone. Operating new satellite constellations, it should behave like it's fiber. So one of the things that we have to do is make it seamless. For a lot of our customers, whether it's AXESS for mining, Orange doing 4G backhaul, or Marlink doing projects in French Guiana for the government there, the one common theme is operating terrestrial and satellite together.
What we need to do is make sure that satellite's not special. It's not different, it's truly seamless, so it integrates into the overall ecosystem.
Alejandro Pinero
And JP, I wanted to ask you about applications. Now, you've mentioned some remote deployments, you've mentioned even private applications. Can you tell us a little bit more about where you see your satellites being implemented and then what those use cases really driving the use are?
John-Paul Hemingway
Yes, so I will pick two. The first is government, and I mean government in all of its branches there. Clearly there are defense elements to it, but there are also governments that want all of their population to have the same access to technology and tools. And what people are looking at now is what they call sovereign capabilities. Is there a way that we can provide something to a government, a nation that means they've got always-on connectivity? Clearly some of the troubles of the world right now have really had people saying, if something happens to my nation, can I run my sovereign cloud? Can I have connectivity to all the departments that need to have connectivity? So, we've got this really nice application, we can carve out part of our constellation and offer it as a virtual constellation, a sovereign network to these nations so they can have access to an NGSO constellation so that they don't have to build their own.
And, of course, it doesn't make sense to have every nation having thousands of satellites. We can provide a virtual constellation to the governments with secure, very resilient and multi-application capabilities for government, cloud and traditional applications. So that's one real driving force right now. I think the second I would say is the world of IoT. Lots of talk here at the show about IoT and different approaches, right? Some are IoT with collector nodes, whether it be 5G as a collection device, there's some dedicated WAN protocols or indeed direct to satellite and having satellite talk directly to the devices or the handset. So this industry is going to play a core part of really rolling up all the hundreds of thousands of IoT devices out there. And if we can do it with high performance, always on, they're collecting all that data and they're taking it literally one hop to space and into the data center, and this is a super secure way to process that data and send smart commands back down to the edge node, so it’s really interesting. Both government sovereign and the world of IoT are two areas that we're deeply involved in.
Alejandro Pinero
And I wanted to pick up on, you mentioned the GEOs and the MEOs. You're talking about that seamless experience. They're probably going to need a variety of technology and satellites. Can you tell us a difference between GEOs and the MEOs where each one is used and then what is the key differences there?
John-Paul Hemingway
Of course. So for geostationary, we've got nearly 50 of these in orbit. We had them a long time and we're building more because the technology keeps booming on. The big advance in GEO right now is software defined GEOs. It used to be that when you designed a GEO, the beam would be the shape of the country you were trying to lay it down on. Now that's all completely software defined, and extremely flexible. They see a really nice sway of the earth, so you can deliver a blanket coverage to something all over or put very focused high energy to give lots of customers a great service. For example, think about airports with lots of planes flying in or out, or high-volume ports with lots of ships coming in and out. So that's what GEO is very, very good for. And then medium earth orbit or low earth orbit come in closer, with higher performance and lower latency. Every orbit has its application, so we have both GEO and MEO and we actually resell other people's LEO capabilities. So we really are the only multi orbit or all orbit capability shop. Now, what makes it really interesting is if you have smart software working which orbit is the right one to use for the right application, and doing that real time. That's an area we're working in right now.
Alejandro Pinero
Brilliant. Now I wanted to ask you about O3b mPOWER. I had a look around your stand. It seems like it's something that you guys are talking about a lot. It's going to go into service soon. Tell us a little bit about it and what it means for your customers.
John-Paul Hemingway
Yes, O3b mPOWER is our generation two. We've been operating in the medium earth orbit for 10 years. A lot of experience that we built over time, and that was something that was great to get the company started in. We actually acquired that into SES and made it a core part of their disruption to the industry. But it had its limitations. There was only a certain amount of capacity, there were physical beams. We'd steer about 10 beams per satellite. So, once you locked in where you were putting it, you had to make sure you could fit all the customers into that beam, which is about 700 kilometers wide. We can now do 5,000 digitally beamed formed applications from every single satellite. And we've got an orbit going up there with six just now. We'll be in service in early Q2 of this year.
So while we are on the cusp of getting this into our customer's hands, we have the flexibility to see huge swathes of the earth. We think at least 80-90% of populations can be covered with it. And we can form beams wherever we want to. And in those beams we can have a base station and a cell tower here that's got some demand and it can spike up over here and you can beam form all of that in real time. They're clearly built with a software engine around that, but we're ready to go. The ground equipment is already deployed at hundreds of customers. The satellites are in their final orbit testing right now, and we can't wait to get it in the hands of our customers in the next few months. So we could not be more excited.
Alejandro Pinero
Amazing. Well, JP, it seems like you guys have a lot going on, a lot of exciting news and a real impact in terms of the connectivity you're bringing to folks. So really appreciate your time and I know it's a busy week for everyone, so even more so thank you JP for joining us here. Thank you for the time.