The business of basic uplinking long ago lost most of its commercial value, and teleport operators moved into value-added services tailored to the unique needs of niche markets to ensure their future. Today the industry stands on the brink of a transformation every bit as big: from operating these technical facilities and niche-market services to becoming network service providers.
The evolution is taking place now, driven by the surging success of LEO broadband offering high bandwidth at low cost. Margins are under pressure, but innovative service providers are turning competitive threat to advantage with multipath, multi-orbit services that offer customers a major improvement in service while creating opportunities to deliver customized services from running customer applications in virtual machines on-network to providing ship management software as a service.
The open API standards emerging from the TM Forum and Metro Ethernet Forum will enable such integration to cross networks and power infrastructure sharing where it makes business sense. At the same time, new categories of customers will find benefit in satellite’s ability to connect without touching the terrestrial network, so that private networks for critical infrastructure can be truly safe from cyber threats. Ultimately, having the technology, structure and customer knowledge to adapt to these changing opportunities will become the greater competitive advantage of all.