A chemical engineering/mining client in Europe led NTT to strike a deal with SES, but they’re seeing the same exact needs in North America and other regions.
That’s according to Shahid Ahmed, group EVP, New Ventures and Innovation at NTT. He said NTT is mainly leveraging SES for backhaul purposes.
The two companies on Tuesday announced a multi-year partnership that brings together NTT’s expertise in networking and enterprise managed services with SES’s satellite capabilities.
The offering combines NTT’s Private 5G and Edge Compute with SES’s second-generation medium earth orbit (MEO) system known as O3b mPower. It’s set up for companies operating where terrestrial networks are inadequate and for enterprises wanting to leverage high-performance connectivity to increase their efficiency and grow revenue, according to a press release.
Ahmed said it’s an ideal partnership in that many of NTT’s clients have operations in remote areas where there’s no real connectivity options. Some examples are factories, cargo container ships, oil rigs, shipyards and ports in industries such as mining, energy, maritime and manufacturing.
The deal with SES is not exclusive. However, SES is different from some other satellite companies because of its MEO capabilities. Low earth orbit (LEO) provides lower latency but the coverage isn’t as good; high altitude satellites are farther away and provide better coverage but the latency gets unbearable.
“The mid orbit seemed a reasonable place for us to go to” for the right latency and speeds and feeds they were looking for, he told Fierce.
With NTT’s private wireless customers, most of the traffic stays locally with the factory for the applications they’re supporting. Push-to-talk is a good example where the traffic stays locally most of the time but occasionally there’s a need to send a text to a geographic location that’s farther away and it needs to go through the cloud, he explained.
The joint solution will deliver coverage to over 190 countries with public-private roaming. In addition to NTT’s Private 5G and Edge Compute capabilities, NTT said it also will provide use-case consulting and design, application development, system integration, implementation and managed services, while SES will provide end-to-end satellite networks via O3b mPower that will be seamlessly integrated with NTT’s offerings.