- The Canadian company Terrestar Solutions wants in on the IoT action
- It’s got capacity from an EchoStar GEO satellite
- And it’s working with Mavenir for terrestrial RAN and core technology
We haven’t heard much from the satellite company Terrestar since it went bankrupt in 2010. But now, an offshoot of that company, Terrestar Solutions, is partnering with Mavenir on a Canada-wide, satellite-based IoT initiative.
Jason Trembley, commercial vice president of Terrestar Solutions, said the company has about 50 employees who mainly work at its headquarters in Montreal. It owns the capacity rights over Canada to EchoStar’s T1 geostationary-Earth-orbit (GEO) satellite. It also has access to 40 MHz of S-band mobile satellite spectrum (MSS) over Canada, along with access to ground-station infrastructure.
There’s momentum in the IoT ecosystem to use low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites to provide services, so Fierce asked if a GEO satellite could do the job, given its longer latency times. Trembley said, “To be frank, it's an existing asset that we're trying to maximize. And geostationary does have certain advantages such as the elevation look angle.”
He noted that Skylo, another company that provides satellite IoT services, operates with GEO players, including Terrestar.
In fact, GEO can be perfectly adequate for IoT use cases that only require an occasional connection, and a single satellite can provide an extremely wide area of coverage.
But LEO does have the upside of faster latency.
Recently, Fierce spoke with Erik Brenneis, CEO of Vodafone IoT, who said LEO satellites have propelled the IoT ecosystem, providing much lower latency and less drain on batteries because the connections don’t have to travel as far back and forth from Earth to the satellites. Brenneis also mentioned the benefits of using narrowband IoT (NB-IoT).
Trembley agreed, saying that using NB-IoT is great because it works for terrestrial networks as well as satellite and “basically brings down the cost, and the economies of scale are more favorable.”
Where does Mavenir fit in all this?
In terms of Terrestar’s work with Mavenir, the companies are offering a standardized IoT solution that works over terrestrial networks as well as satellite. And Mavenir is providing its virtualized RAN, converged packet core and network management.
Trembley said that Terrestar is in talks with Canadian operators such as Bell and Telus to run the service over their terrestrial networks.
Sachin Karkala, general manager for IMS and RAN at Mavenir, said the company has been pursuing satellite-based IoT “for the last three years,” and Terrestar is its “anchor customer.”
Of its partnership with Terrestar, “we’ve given them a solution which has got carrier-grade stability and design that we see across the terrestrial network,” Karkala said.
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