As 5G NTN edges closer to scale, operators and vendors are working to synchronize strategies and prepare for what the shift to 6G will demand.
Constellations spoke with Blane Boynton, SVP of product management and development at SES, Andrew Cavalier, senior analyst at ABI Research and Greg Quiggle, SVP of product management at Kratos during this year’s Satellite Show to discuss how operators are integrating 5G into their long-term business strategies.
Read our top four takeaways from our panel conversation, or listen to the full episode.
Takeaway 1: The industry is already preparing for 6G.
The NTN ecosystem is rapidly maturing, and the industry is now moving beyond the early milestones set by Release 17, said ABI Research’s Cavalier.
"We now see NR-NTN is on the horizon, and that’s just the path towards 6G,” Cavalier said.
SpaceX recently announced that the next-generation Starlink Mobile Gen 2 will support NR‑NTN, while Iridium has also confirmed it will launch NB‑IoT services based on the Release 17/18 standard, Cavalier noted. Other operators, including AST SpaceMobile, Lynk and even SES are positioning themselves to align with these standards as well, he said.
"There’s a lot of movement happening,” Cavalier said. Chipset vendors are incorporating the standards into their hardware, commercial devices are coming to market and mobile network operators like Deutsche Telekom and T‑Mobile are forming partnerships with satellite providers to offer these services, he said. This includes IoT use cases as well as direct‑to‑device connectivity for smartphones, he said.
“We’re seeing commercialization happening and we’re on the road to 6G,” he said.
As the components needed to build and scale networks become available, there’s likely to be 5G NTN deployment as operators adopt 5G and prepare for a 6G future, said SES’ Boynton, agreeing with Cavalier.
“I don’t think it’s a question of if. I think it’s a question of when. I see the need there. I see the capabilities brewing. I see the willingness on the part of a few folks in industry to push it a little bit,” Boynton said, adding that he expects to see a “meaningful NTN deployment” in 12-18 months.
Takeaway 2: LEO operators need a D2D strategy.
“If you are a LEO operator, you’re going to need a direct-to-device strategy. I think that’s a certainty,” Boynton said.
“The LEO spacecraft are best suited, for a number of reasons, to serve the direct-to-device use case. The question of how well and at what scale is still open, and you see constellations being lowered to be more suitable for that use case,” he continued.
We already have a few use cases deployed today that could improve significantly once interoperability becomes the norm. Take sponsored connectivity and mobility, for example – services like Wi-Fi on airplanes or cruise ships, where mobile operators want to maintain a relationship with customers even when they’re out of reach of terrestrial networks, Boynton noted.
In aviation specifically, T‑Mobile has offered sponsored in‑flight connectivity for some time, and AT&T recently began providing free connectivity on American Airlines, Boynton said. Ideally, these connections would be enabled through standards‑based roaming rather than the one‑off integrations used in the past. When Boynton was at Gogo, the company had to integrate directly with T‑Mobile’s AAA system, which worked, he said, but was not scalable.
Enabling telcos and MNOs to serve otherwise unreachable customers represents a major opportunity, and it’s closer than many may think, even though the process is still cumbersome today, Boynton said.
Takeaway 3: Virtual ground and AI are helping operators to scale.
While not limited to 5G, the industry’s shift toward virtualized ground architecture is a key enabler of scale, said Kratos’ Quiggle.
“A big thing that’s a trend, actually somewhat independent of 5G, is virtualization of ground systems,” Quiggle said. “If I were to walk back into a gateway 20 years ago, I would see racks and racks and racks of hardware, typically all for a very specialized purpose. Sometimes they support different baseband systems. Sometimes they support carrier monitoring systems. Sometimes they support management systems. But they’re all unique. When you’re an operator in that environment, what that means is it’s very costly to scale.”
But now nearly the entire industry has moved to virtualized ground architectures as a way to dramatically reduce the costs associated with bespoke hardware systems, Quiggle said.
Virtualization allows operators to use the same infrastructure for various use cases – from Earth observation downlinks to carrier monitoring to satellite command and control, Quiggle said. "It allows them to dramatically reduce their cost base, which is really important at a time that we’re talking about scale as an industry,” he said.
Optimizing a global 5G network at scale also necessitates a high degree of automation, said Quiggle.
"As you look at even a small global 5G network, you could easily have thousands of cells, right? I mean, you could easily have tens of thousands of terminals that are traversing the globe using those cells. Optimizing that at scale on a regular basis requires a significant amount of automation. You simply can’t do it the way that you could 10 years ago when the world was covered by wide-beam satellites,” Quiggle said.
AI enables operators to fine tune a network in “pseudo-real-time” to maximize the efficiency, performance and overall robustness of the network, Quiggle said. This capability allows operators to proactively detect network outages in advance, providing a better experience for and ultimately retaining their customers, he said.
"Once [outages] have already happened, customers are out, and now you’re on the clock,” Quiggle said. “The more that you can proactively detect an outage in an area like that, the better overall experience you’re going to provide to a customer.”
Takeaway 4: A fragmented NTN market could hinder its growth.
When it comes to 5G NTN, the technical challenges aren’t the only hurdles – misalignment across the ecosystem remains one of the biggest risks to 5G NTN’s progress, Cavalier said.
Telecom adoption rarely moves in a straight line, and uncertainty grows when different players aren’t pulling in the same direction. Early in 5G NTN development, some operators rushed to market with non‑standard implementations, creating fragmentation and mixed signals for the rest of the ecosystem, Cavalier said. Chipset makers, device manufacturers and mobile operators were left trying to interpret conflicting approaches, unsure which direction would ultimately prevail, he said.
"Alongside that, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing,” Cavalier said.
Chipset vendors were ready to move forward but didn’t see enough satellite capacity coming online to justify large‑scale production. Without clear, aligned service offerings to support, they hesitated – a dynamic that still poses a risk if coordination doesn’t improve, Cavalier said.
“There needs to be common ground and communication that’s like this dialogue that we’re having now between all the players in the ecosystem to help get the solution out to the market,” Cavalier said.
For more, listen to the full episode.
Explore More:
Beyond Connectivity: The Next Phase of 5G NTN Deployment
Automation, Governance and the Release 19 Shift in 5G NTN
Is Direct-to-Device Driving Satellite’s 5G Standards Push?
