Future of Satellite Communication
Soon there will be mining expeditions on Mars and the Periodic Table may expand to add newly discovered elements. Human presence on the Red Planet may not be ruled out yet but initially remotely controlled robots will perform the tasks. Billions of dollars investments from Multinational mining, power and fuel companies will make this venture possible soon enough. But like on earth these expeditions will be connected through daily improving Satellite Communication Technology.
In almost half a century Satellite and Satellite Communication industry has witnessed amazing growth, improvement and innovation. Now we are dealing with High Throughput Satellites and efficient ground equipment including antennas, ODU’s and modems. Credit goes to sense of competition and everyday increase in demand of bandwidth requirement at lower costs. Every new satellite launch, new modem release or even firmware release for that sake has something new to offer, which their competitor lacks. But like Cellular communication where even the competitors share infrastructure like BTS sites and towers, will the players of satellite communication industry go an extra mile to adopt such relationships getting added coverage and added value to their customers. I know and have witnessed some agreements between satellite operators, but that doesn’t seem enough.
Let’s assume that the joint ventures I talked about in previous paragraph are not limited to teleport, transponder or bandwidth sharing but goes way beyond. Yes I am talking about more functional satellites which transport data traffic to adjacent satellite, making a circular pipe of almost 294925 km of wireless communication. This will eliminate the delays faced by double or even multiple hops from earth stations to communicate between two or multiple points on globe not covered by a single satellite. This will also eliminate involvement hybrid networks including fiber. Similarly this scenario can be modeled for earth station equipment specially satellite modems. Again quoting rapid advancement of Cellular Communication, where a cellular operator deploys network multiple vendors at both BSS & NSS, still network operates efficiently.
Moving back to advancement in technology we can be expecting Polar satellites, serving the areas where Geosynchronous satellites have very low look angle and not very good footprints. Even new satellites may have increased capacity to perform observation and monitoring tasks not relying on any active communication just to record any disaster like that of MH370 based only on passive communication. Satellite Communication industry has lot more to offer and trends of growth and innovation will keep improving every year. So all those people working in the industry don’t worry about the growth of microwave & fiber network, they can’t go Extra Terrestrial.