The Network Edge Supplement

Where telcos meet data centers

AtlasEdge goes all in

> Why the company is betting everything on the Edge

Towers and the Edge

> Telco tower real estate could be reused for the Edge

Space comes for fiber

> Why SES hopes to use satellites to replace fiber

4. Why AtlasEdge is all in on the Edge And how it hopes to become the McDonald’s of the Edge data center world

10. Where is the Edge in 2023? A lot of talk, some action, but still some way to go

12. Towers and the Edge TowerCos have identified their role in pushing the Edge

14. Space comes for fiber: Can satellites offer data centers a new resiliency option?

SES pitches its new mPower fleet as a viable alternative to fiber for telcos and data center operators

Assessing the Network Edge

e're still hearing a lot of promises about the Edge and what it will bring to the data center industry as a whole.

Of course, there are potential use cases like those of AI, IoT, AR, and VR. But we have been hearing about them for years.

While there is still optimism in the industry, there's also an acceptance that the pace at which these Edge deployments have arrived has been slower than anticipated.

The stakes are high, though, with IDC tipping Edge computing investment to hit a staggering $208 billion this year alone.

Of those countries leading the Edge spend race, the US is unsurprisingly top of the list, accounting for 40 percent of the worldwide total.

Leveraging the Tower for Edge

Telecom towers form the basis of mobile infrastructure, enabling critical connectivity in cities, towns, and remote areas.

Without them we'd be up a certain creek without a paddleand we wouldn't be able to call anyone for help.

But these sites aren't just for mobile towers.

These incredibly sought after assets are providing TowerCos with additional revenue streams beyond just hosting mobile network operators.

Some of the biggest tower companies in the world are bringing mini data centers to these sites, as they eye an opportunity to corner the Edge.

WBut power constraints and business challenges remain.

Serving secondary markets

In the massive data center market of Europe, FLAP-D regions are well served.

There are other towns and cities in Europe that process vasts amount of data and require somewhere to store it.

That's the view of AtlasEdge, a company that was set up as a JV between Liberty Global and DigitalBridge.

It has identified the secondary and tertiary markets as perfect for its Edge data center solution. With a recent €725 million ($800m) credit facility, it's looking to serve even more markets.

We speak to the company about why it's gone all in on the Edge.

Satellite to rival fiber?

While the headlines focus on the hype of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, incumbent operators continue to improve and iterate on the larger satellites at higher orbits, increasingly offering gigabit and terabit capacity connections. With its latest O3b constellation, European operator SES aims to combine the high throughput and resiliency of geostationary satellites with the low latency of LEO.

Can this new breed of satellite offer viable competition to fiber for telcos and data center operators?

Patience is key

After its slow start, the Edge appears to be finding its feet.

We hear from those that remain confident that the building blocks are in place to deliver on the promise of Edge soon.

Why AtlasEdge is all in on the Edge

Paul Lipscombe Telco Editor

And how it hopes to become the McDonald’s of the Edge data center world

The Edge remains an illdefined and marketingfocused term used by companies that are often looking to repackage their existing products for a new audience.

But while many see it as a promising opportunity in the future, one company has staked its business on the Edge not just being the wave of the future, but on it being a very tangible reality today.

AtlasEdge was formed in 2021 by Liberty Global and Digital Bridge (then Digital Colony) to combine the two giants’ assets for a European Edge play.

The company now operates more than 100 Edge data centers across Europe in cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, Leeds, Madrid, Manchester, Milan, Paris, and Zurich.

Serving the underserved

To gain a better understanding of AtlasEdge’s approach to the Edge, DCD spoke to the company’s SVP for colocation, David Hall.

A veteran in this industry, Hall boasts over 15 years’ worth of experience in the carrier-neutral data center industry, most recently at Equinix.

A year on from that move, he explains that AtlasEdge is on a mission to serve the areas that are often underserved.

“We’re not particularly interested in the FLAP [Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris] markets as these are covered by the legacy colos already. Instead, we're very much interested in serving those more underserved markets, such as Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Birmingham, and Leeds.”

The company provides an array of services to its customers, including traditional colocation, Edge colo, interconnection, cloud access, IXP access, and remote hands.

“Fundamentally, the Internet relies on data centers that are the equivalent of two Michelin restaurants, and you know they're beautiful, and many of them are beautiful, magnificent temples to data centers,” he explains.

“So I guess that is where we would think of ourselves as similar to McDonald's. You can go anywhere in the world and you can get a Big Mac and you know that it is consistent and it's low cost.

“It's super reliable at two o'clock in the morning when you've just stepped off an airplane in Singapore, and you're hungry. There's always going to be a McDonald's there. And I think that speaks to the kind of similarity in our model. We want to provide a consistent, reliable product available at any time to our customers.”

A varied menu for its clients

Like fast food joints, AtlasEdge’s facilities can vary greatly in size. These can be from 2MW all the way up to 20MW and anything in between.

“Cities such as Liverpool and Bristol - and Brighton where I live - there’s not a need for these huge 100MW data

centers, but a smaller class of data center that we call aggregation hubs,” says Hall.

Hall adds that AtlasEdge has the ability to mix it up, depending on what their clients request of them.

“We assumed that these secondary and tertiary markets would require data centers of the order of two-six megawatts, or around that. But we're really seeing them exceeding that, particularly from the platform demand. So, an individual platform requirement in a secondary market such as Hamburg or Berlin is way in excess of two or three megawatts just for one platform.”

He explains that the company categorizes data centers like you would when you’re out shopping for a T-shirt. The smallest AtlasEdge data centers will offer 500kW, while 2MW would be medium, and 4-6MW would be large.

Since this initial approach, he says that AtlasEdge has added an XL size, noting that some projects the company has under development for 20MW.

When it comes to who is using AtlasEdge’s data centers, Hall estimates that hyperscalers account for the highest usage at around 60 percent, followed by telcos and enterprises with 20 percent apiece.

“A lot of the demand has been from hyperscalers. When we deliver capacity to them it tends to create an ecosystem around that. Each of the hyperscalers has an on-ramp to their public cloud product.

“When we’re building out capacity for the hyperscalers, they’re very interested in building these out in Edge locations so they to get traffic onto their networks as quickly as possible.”

Leveraging its assets - Virgin Media

When the creation of AtlasEdge was first announced, DigitalBridge CEO Marc Ganzi said that the new company was "an opportunity for us to apply the entire Digital Colony value-add

David Hall AtlasEdge

playbook, leveraging our operating expertise, strategic M&A capabilities, and access to institutional capital in partnership with a world-class organization like Liberty Global.”

The M&A chops soon came to the fore, after AtlasEdge acquired German data center firm Datacenter One (DC1) from Star Capital.

Although financial details of the deal were not revealed, it saw AtlasEdge expand its footprint in Germany, scooping up two data centers in Stuttgart, and one apiece in Dusseldorf and Leverkusen.

Meanwhile, in the UK, AtlasEdge is planning to develop two data centers in Manchester

Each building will have four data halls over two floors, totaling 3,426 sqm (36,900 sq ft).

Significantly, the company will be constructing these data centers next

to a Virgin Media-O2 facility, which accommodates a data hub for the telco and some colocation operations. Virgin Media-O2 is owned by Liberty.

These developments show just how significant the backing is for AtlasEdge, says Hall, which he calls the lovechild of its two giant parents.

“This JV means we have fantastic financial backing, particularly from DigitalBridge, which is obviously a big investor in this space. But really importantly - and this is how I differentiate us from other data center operators who have suddenly become Edge data center operators in the last couple of years - we have real access to these networks, which really is the crux of what we mean by Edge.”

View on the Edge

During a DCD panel on the Edge earlier this year, AtlasEdge VP Edge strategy Mark Cooper defined Edge as “an ever-

evolving definition” depending on the day of the week it is, before noting the metaverse and what it can bring.

Hall is a bit more direct with his views on Edge. “Edge means where you can connect into the last mile networks. So wherever that place is, that is the Edge of the network. It's not the Edge of the map.”

He adds: “If you look at the landscape of so-called Edge providers, there’s been a lot that has popped up over the years, the last couple of years, certainly. And frankly, they're all businesses that existed before and have now put Edge in the name because it's the next cool, trendy thing,” joking that these people probably had AI in their name five years ago.

“The challenge for many of those providers is that they don't have the relationships with the networks, which AtlasEdge does through Liberty Global.”

Credit: Hardy Fisher Leverkusen

Recent investment will bring further acquisitions

AtlasEdge isn’t showing signs of slowing down with its ambition to acquire and build more data centers.

In April, the business announced that it secured a €725 million ($800m) credit facility , of which the package consists of €525 million ($579m) in committed debt financing and a further €200 million ($221m) uncommitted accordion.

The financing also includes sustainability-linked targets focused on efficiency and renewable energy usage.

At the time, AtlasEdge said the facility provides AtlasEdge with ‘considerable firepower’ to execute further strategic M&A and build new sites throughout Europe’s key markets.

“They are not free to build right?”, adds Hall, who says the money will be invested very quickly. He notes that the investment shows that AtlasEdge is able

to raise significant capital for future M&A opportunities, and data center builds.

“Put simply we’ve had to finance the DC One deal and so part of the facility loan has gone towards that.

“On top of this, we’ve been investing heavily in data centers and have got some data centers in some great locations, but frankly, some have been unloved for at least 10 years, and to love data centers tends to mean money, so we’re investing significantly in improving these assets.”

Hall adds that the company is also investing in its PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness), with liquid cooling a possible avenue for efficiency improvements.

He explains that will help with cost and sustainability, and says AtlasEdge is working with three preferred vendors of liquid cooling, including ChillDyne, ZutaCore, and Submer, which provides immersion cooling.

Identifying the potential of liquid cooling, Hall says he expects it to account for a third of the workload in the coming years.

“We very much want to give customers the chance to be able to make their own choices with respect to liquid cooling, because I think the markets are still in flux. But operationally, we also want to understand this stuff.

“We need to start from somewhere. So we chose three options, which I think gives customers good flexibility. But if your customers want to bring along their own cooling solution, that's fine, too. In terms of our planning, we're expecting about 30 percent of the workload to be liquid cooled in three years’ time.”

European push for now

“Europe is huge,” laughed Hall, when asked about expansion plans beyond the continent, noting that its work in spreading out will keep it occupied for some time.

“We’ve got so many projects ongoing, so I think realistically over the next three to four years, you'll see us build around half a gigawatt, maybe even a gigawatt of capacity.

“We could deliver that in Europe, right? So, for us, we're super focused on growing that European market for now.”

As for other markets such as Asia or North America, the company isn’t immediately looking to venture into these regions, but as Hall says, “never say never.”

“Wherever we are, it’s about being consistent with the solutions we’re providing. We’re really focused on making sure that customers can buy the Big Mac, wherever they are on the AtlasEdge platform.” 

Datacenter One

Best practices for network Edge data centers

OnPrem Edge is not enough. To be truly effective, network Edge data centers must offer the fastest, most scalable computing and reliable network connection…

Being as close to the user as possible is rarely sufficient, on its own, for a truly effective Edge data center topology. After all, efficiency would be best served by centralization, so in addition to proximity to end users, the Edge needs the network because data is rarely processed in isolation.

As Andres Vasquez, segment director for cloud & service providers, at Schneider Electric explains: “The ‘network Edge’ describes the interface point where the Internet or cloud connects with computers and now with smart devices. This model is a distributed system in which small, strategically placed network Edge data centers process data as close to where it is generated as possible.”

The network Edge, he adds, will be one of the key enablers for real IoT [Internet of Things] and enable machine-to-machine communications.

The topology that Vasquez sees emerging is quite straightforward: hyperscale data centers, typically cloud service providers, with “regional Edge” or “metro zones” and, closest to the users, the far Edge, which requires both standardization and prefabrication so that data center operators can react fast to market changes.

“Potentially, you’ll need a data center of up to 90 racks for regional Edge, but we’re also seeing projects of up to just five racks, medium density, in the middle of nowhere. We’re already seen a couple of projects, too, with up to three racks, medium density, every 50km to enable autonomous and network Edge applications; for us those are facilities between 10kW to 2MW” says Vasquez.

Management challenge: Staffing and monitoring

Managing a series of highly centralized, hyperscale data center facilities is challenging enough – but what are the steps that need to be taken to manage network Edge data center facilities?

For these facilities, performance is even more critical, yet the availability of staffing to ensure it performs to expectations, 24/7, may be lighter on the ground.

First, suggests Vasquez, it’s impor-tant to adopt a consistent approach to each and every network Edge facility to simplify management, monitoring, and maintenance. For this, EcoStruxure by Schneider Electric as an open platform and architecture is “the total solution,” he says. “It provides the data center, regardless of its size, with a scalable solution that can be rolled out in a more sustainable way.”

EcoStruxure DCIM 3.0 software, offers flexible deployment options for both onpremise and cloud-based data centers that can scale from a handful of sites to thousands of sites, across the world. It provides secure monitoring and management across the entire infrastructure, together with planning and modeling, regardless of facility size.

It therefore supports an easily replicable ‘cookie cutter’ approach, so that data center operators can deploy common tools, enabling much faster reactions to market demands and quicker roll-outs.

Second, whatever management solution is selected needs to be fully integrated across power, IT, and the building itself – like EcoStruxure – so that it can provide monitoring and management across the entire data center, as well as backing up service level agreements (SLAs) for clients.

Remote locations

The next steps all relate to the physical remoteness of network Edge facilities.

First, power and cooling needs to be well-specified to cover all eventualities because appropriate staff may not be onsite or even near to the facility should any failure occur. UPS with Lithium-ion batteries, for example, are preferable as they offer longer lifespans compared to conventional battery technology.

Likewise, liquid cooling is positioned as a more consistent cooling solution than air, offering higher efficiency.

Second, ruggedized enclosures can better withstand the highly variable environments a network Edge facility might have to contend with. These may include dust, greater heat concentrations, and even external influences, depending on where it is located. For example, the US armed forces are now deploying containerized modular data centers to military bases, which might also be loaded onto trailers and moved at any time.

As a result of all that, data center operators need to revisit physical security to take into account the particular conditions that network Edge data centers might be operating in. For example, installations need cameras and biometric access locks, with alerts generated for attempted intrusions and to control any maintenance intervention. Within the facility, IT cabinets need to be locked as standard – again, with alerts generated for unauthorized attempted access.

All this needs to be done while bearing in mind sustainability and corporate Net Zero commitments. Here, technology partners can help, says Vasquez. “As part of our sustainability services we support our customers with Energy procurement services and strategies, covering how to manage the Scopes 2 and 3 footprints to aid decarbonization for both the data center operator and its customers "

In addition, Schneider has recently released a new tool intended to help data center operators to calculate their carbon footprints and, thereby, to better understand what they need to do in order to reduce their operations' carbon emissions

For further information on challenges and guidance at the network Edge, learn more from Andres here. 

Where is the Edge in 2023?

A lot of talk, some action, but still some way to go

Edge computing has gone mainstream," Dave McCarthy, research vice president, of cloud and Edge infrastructure services at IDC, notes.

The analyst firm believes that Edge computing is forecast to hit $208 billion this year, an 13.1 percent jump over the previous year.

"The ability to distribute applications and data to field locations is a key element of most digital transformation initiatives,” he says. “As vendors extend existing feature sets and create new Edgespecific offerings, customers are accelerating their adoption plans."

The expectation is there for Edge to take off, but is the infrastructure in place to support this?

Where does Edge infrastructure stand currently?

Europe is a strong market for Edge, according to nLighten CTO Chad McCarthy, who refers to the historic data center industry, notably the FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris) market, plus Dublin too in recent years.

“In Europe, we have a highly developed data center industry, and historically the FLAP locations were the main data centers content depots,” he says in the DCD panel Infrastructure and the Edge. “That’s where a lot compute still takes place now.

“The network infrastructure is evolving rapidly, so it’s possible to have a far better network service at the Edge, which used to be the big bottleneck, and that opportunity means that industrial companies, commercial companies, and also private users are able to to use data more in remote locations.”

Capgemini chief technology & innovation officer

Gunnar Menzel adds that the concept of Edge is nothing new.

“We always talk about Edge like it’s a new development, but it isn’t,” explained Menzel.

“We’re always thinking about where you could locate data, centralized or decentralized. Take retail outlets where you have many stores, you could also argue back in the ‘90s that you had Edge computing in those stores because we couldn't centralize. So it's not a new technology, per se, or new approach.”

He adds that the ability to connect data better is what has changed, noting faster fiber broadband, and the advancements around satellite communication.

As with many though, he wants Edge to be built out even further to help applications such as the metaverse come to life.

Edge taking longer than hoped

With the Edge slow to find its feet, Dataqube CEO Steve Pass argues that the network side is in a strong position to drive Edge opportunities.

“It seems to be definitely leading and is way ahead when it comes to Edge, bringing that capability closer to users through last-mile, high bandwidth,” said Pass, who says compute is lagging generally.

“So now we've got the capability for the Edge highspeed networks, the use cases are going to drive the need for compute services. I think that will drive a lot of innovation and adoption of new technology over the next few years. People who are going to deploy infrastructure at the Edge are going to have to be able to be very flexible as users start consuming at scale.”

Paul Lipscombe Telco Editor

5G’s role in developing the Edge

5G may not be the most common form of mobile connectivity at present, but has grown rapidly since its 2019 launch.

Fast forward to 2023 and the technology is tipped to play a pivotal role in driving Edge applications.

“I think one of the key drivers for Edge is going to be the new private 5G spectrum that is coming across Europe, which is going to make it possible for a lot of enterprises and commercial centers to have their own private 5G networks,” says Open Nebula senior Edge solutions architect Alfonso Carrillo.

One such company that specializes in private 5G services is Kyndryl, which was created as a spin-off of IBM's infrastructure services business.

5G is critical to tapping into Edge applications, says Kyndryl SVP US network and Edge, Gretchen Tinnerman.

“I think its critically important because as our clients are investing more in the convergence of IT and OT (operational technology) at the Edge, they're looking for a private network, not a public one,” Tinnerman told DCD.

“Our clients know that these applications and these Edge devices are extremely critical to the infrastructure and require private network connectivity.”

The company has identified the industrial sector as an industry that can benefit massively from private networks and recently worked with Dow Chemicals at a lab plant in Freeport, Texas.

This was driven due to Kyndryl’s partnership with Nokia, with the duo

combining to deploy a private network with Edge computing.

Implementing a private network at the site has aided the modernization of the Dow plant, as the advanced connectivity has increased allegedly worker safety and enabled remote audio and video collaboration and real-time smart procedures.

Tinnerman says that Kyndryl’s been able to support the connected worker at Dow, thanks to the Edge.

“With Dow, it’s really about the connected worker and taking their challenges which may be a lack of connection and trying to increase connected worker solutions to improve use cases such as safety.

“Our private network has meant that the workforce has been able to access applications right in front of them at the Edge, helping them to improve stability, efficiencies, and safety.”

Dow has stated that within the first four months of its digital transformation, its Freeport plant has been able to reduce the time it takes workers to complete operational tasks, and has completed over 28,000 digital procedures.

Challenges around the Edge

Tinnerman thinks that the biggest challenge for the Edge right now is the slow adoption rate, which she blames the mindset around change.

“We’ve not seen the acceleration of the adoption rate in this industry with our clients, that many of us integrators and providers thought we would see,” she said.

She adds that there’s a lack of skills, technology, and resources for traditional networks meaning that some can’t support the low-latency applications that would thrive off Edge.

Others point to the pace at which innovation around technology is evolving, noting that it can be difficult to keep up with the trends.

Positive Pass for Edge

For Dataqube’s Pass, this innovation is a good thing and will help the Edge sector to kick on, and will push industries to be more cost-efficient, energy-efficient, and sustainability-focused.

“The pace of innovation is going to drive the companies and individuals to move towards Edge,” says Pass.

“Ok, the pace has been slower than expected with Edge, but I think that's about to change at some point in the near future and it's just going to accelerate from there.”

He warns that businesses run the risk of being left behind if they don’t adopt Edge services, networks, and capabilities.

“Businesses are going to have to adopt Edge, otherwise they're going to be left behind. That could be as simple as managing a farm or a mine or something like that and doing it more cost-effectively to gain a competitive advantage over the competition. It’s an exciting time for the industry.”

Towers and the Edge

Paul Lipscombe Telco Editor

TowerCos have identified their role in pushing the Edge

Tower companies have been looking at Edge computing as an opportunity area for new market opportunities for several years now,” said Chris Antlitz, Technology Business Research principal analyst.

“There's actually been some startups that have some very interesting technology like Vapor IO that makes technology that's optimized for far Edge deployments, especially locations like a tower site. The towers are very interesting because they have access to power, fiber, and access to direct integration within the access network, especially on the mobile side.”

Vapor IO recently expanded its Kinetic Grid Edge computing platform to Europe through a partnership with Spanish telco Cellnex Telecom.

Cellnex hosts the Kinetic Grid platform on its fiber optic network in Barcelona, connecting to Vapor's existing grid in the US. Other European cities are expected to follow, using Cellnex's network of data centers and tower ground space.

Vapor IO’s Kinetic G xrid platform, which has been rolled out into more than 30 US markets,

links data centers to a platform that supports applications close to users and data sources, making distributed Edge applications faster and more reliable, and minimizing traffic toward the core of the network.

Linking Towers and the Edge

So what’s the link between Towers and Edge? Antlitz explained to DCD that this is where data center companies are playing a key role.

He notes that TowerCos have identified the role which data center companies can play in helping them take advantage of Edge computing opportunities.

“Some tower companies have made acquisitions of data center type companies, and part of the reason is that they need to understand this, as they’re not in the data center business,” said Antlitz.

“By acquiring assets, they can familiarize themselves with that, and they can prepare for the proliferation of Edge compute sites.”

Edge data centers located at the tower

At nearly 226,000 sites, American Tower Corporation (ATC) is one of the world’s largest TowerCos. But the company has begun to venture beyond just towers, and into the Edge.

In the spring of 2019, ATC acquired Colo Atl, marking its entry into the industry.

Tha business has six Edge data centers located strategically across the US, with two in Colorado, and one in each of Flordia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

Two years later, ATC snapped up carrierneutral data center company CoreSite for $10.1 billion. CoreSite operates around 25 data centers across the US.

At the time, ATC said the deal will be “transformative” for its mobile Edge compute business, allowing it to establish a “converged communications and computing infrastructure offering with distributed points of presence across multiple Edge layers.”

“The combined company will be ideally positioned to address the growing need for convergence between mobile network providers, cloud service providers, and other digital platforms as 5G deployments emerge and evolve,” added CoreSite CEO Paul Szurek.

ATC isn’t the only tower company doing this either, with rivals SBA Communications and Crown Castle eyeing the market.

SBA recently launched an Edge data center at a tower location in the Dallas Fort Worth area of Texas.

Jeff Stoops, CEO at SBA, recently revealed that the company has “somewhere between 40 and 50” Edge sites in operation or development.

The company began exploring Edge computing modules at tower sites in 2018 in partnership with Packet before its acquisition by Equinix.

SBA’s portfolio of Edge infrastructure includes mini data centers with multiple cabinets for colocation and redundant power and systems for critical IT uses, with these modules varying in size.

Why are they doing this?

Telecom towers could be the ideal location for small-scale Edge nodes.

“Towers are the perfect location for micro data centers as real estate in cities is expensive and limited, hence it is very hard to build larger data centers here,” STL

Partners' senior consultant Matt Bamforth says. “Plus, they are already equipped with connectivity and power – two critical factors to enable data centers.

“Tower companies (and mobile operators who still own their towers) can capitalize on this opportunity. Many next-generation applications will need compute to be brought to the last mile to achieve the necessary latency. Meanwhile, carriers are virtualizing their RAN, which will accelerate investment in data center-like facilities at towers and consolidate network equipment at these premises.”

He adds that IT infrastructure for Edge applications can be colocated at these premises, further optimizing investments and opening up additional revenue streams.

Effectively, the closer that data centers and servers are to the point of transmission, then the easier it is for technologies such as IoT, VR, and artificial intelligence to become accommodated, without increasing network congestion and latency.

However, the Edge sites are usually limited in size due to the power constraints of a tower deployment - with the towers designed without an Edge data center in mind.

Carriers’ view on Edge

Verizon is also keen to get in on the Edge, inking preliminary 5G and Edge deals with Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft.

Verizon has identified virtual RAN (vRAN) as a key part of its Edge strategy, with the operator aiming to deploy 20,000 by the end of 2025

Virtual RAN or vRAN as it’s also known, effectively virtualizes the functions of a traditional RAN (Radio Access Network) and offers them on flexible and scalable cloud platforms instead.

The telco noted that the deployment is in response to customers’ varied latency and computing needs, while it also

Towers & the Edge

provides greater flexibility and agility in the introduction of new products and services. Verizon says that 5G uses will rely heavily on the programmability of virtualized networks.

The towers are also the location of where virtual RAN is, notes Antlitz, which he says is the evolution of radio that will be one of the key use cases for Edge computing.

Reality check on Edge

Whilst Antlitz does acknowledge the potential of Edge computing, he’s also quick to state that the sector remains in an “experimentation” phase that hasn’t taken off as the industry had expected.

“The Edge has not proliferated at the extent the industry thought it would maybe just two years ago, as the market has slowed significantly from original projections.”

There are a few reasons for this, he says, including the silicon that is used.

“Silicon needs to evolve to process workloads at the far Edge more efficiently. It's too power-hungry and there's not enough power. Power is a big limitation at the far Edge, and although it's available, it’s limited. The other thing is it's you need to build sites that are at form factors that are suited for far Edge deployments.”

The cost of these Edge deployments is also a factor, plus the uncertainty around the return on investment it brings. But he’s confident that Edge compute will be deployed at tens of thousands of sites in the next decade.

He expects the tower companies to leverage their assets to tap into an industry he says is worth tens of billions of dollars.

“The tower companies have identified Edge computing as a growth opportunity for them over many years. Edge will help these companies to add a new form of revenue, if they can leverage what assets they already have, along with their existing customers.” 

Space comes for fiber: Can satellites offer data centers a new resiliency option?

SES pitches its new mPower fleet as a viable alternative to fiber for telcos and data center operators

Dan Swinhoe News Editor

Satellites are but a small part of the connectivity landscape.

EuroConsult estimates that total global satellite capacity will reach 50Tbps by 2026 (currently a little less than 25Tbps), while total subsea cable capacity for 2026 is predicted to reach 8,750Tbps.

Fiber will likely always rule the roost, but as satellite throughput capacity continues to increase, in-orbit connectivity is becoming an increasingly viable part of the real-time connectivity strategy for large companies and not just a limited fallback.

At a visit to SES’ HQ in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, the satellite company put on several demonstrations to show DCD that modern constellations can offer viable competition to fiber for telcos and data center operators.

MEO – offering the best of GEO and LEO

Founded as Société Européenne des Satellites by the Luxembourgish government in 1985, for most of its history SES has been a GEO (geostationary orbit) satellite player.

The company was Europe’s first private satellite operator, launching the Astra 1A satellite in 1988 to provide satellite TV for the likes of Sky. Today the company operates more than 50 GEO satellites providing TV and connectivity services.

It also became the first company to operate in multiple orbits after acquiring O3b Networks and taking over its Medium Earth Obit (MEO) fleet in 2016.

Founded by Greg Wyler in 2007, O3b Networks aimed to launch a new

constellation of MEO communication satellites around 8,000km above Earth.

O3b stood for "other three billion" - the three billion people that, at the time, did not have regular access to the Internet. After originally planning to launch in 2010, the first O3b satellite was launched in 2013. The last batch went up in 2019 and today 20 of the 700kg Thales Alenia Space-made Kaband machines are in orbit.

SES took a 30 percent stake in O3b in 2009 for $75 million, joining the likes of Google as an investor. It subsequently raised its stake in the company to 49.1 percent before acquiring the remainder of the firm for $730m in 2016.

Traditionally, GEO’s 36,000km orbit has offered reliably constant coverage – satellites follow the Earth from a fixed perspective – but at low bandwidths and high latency. Newer machines are now offering higher throughput into the terabits, but the latency is an unavoidable byproduct of the distance from Terra Firma.

LEO, at much lower altitudes of under 1,000km, has generally offered much lower latency, albeit with lower coverage of the planet. While their reduced size results in lower costs and rapid development, they aren’t built with the same redundancy and resiliency in mind while flying in a more crowded and dangerous orbit.

SES pitches MEO and its two O3b networks as offering high throughput with latency comparable to LEO, but combined with a field of view and level of resiliency and redundancy that has traditionally been associated with GEO orbits.

Existing connectivity customers for the first generation O3b fleet include AWS, Microsoft, BT, Orange, AT&T, Lumen, TIM, Vodacom, Telefonica, and Reliance Jio.

Deployed use cases include backhaul from remote cell sites in Brazil; equipping telecoms disaster recovery trucks with antennae to provide communications and connectivity coverage in the wake of a major event that’s damaged existing permanent infrastructure.

“You show up with two antennas and two small racks on a van, and within three hours you have a 5G network live helping first responders,” says Saba Wehbe VP, service engineering & delivery at SES, who joined the company as part of the O3b acquisition.

O3b has the power

As satellite technology has improved, the next batch of MEO satellites is set to offer more bandwidth to more customers. SES’ second generation MEO fleet, O3b mPower, was first announced in 2017, with the first

Boeing BSS-702X-built satellites launched by SpaceX in December 2022.

Each 1,700kg Ka-band satellite makes five orbits a day around the Earth. The main difference between the original O3b fleet and the mPower fleet, aside from increased throughput, is the number of beams each satellite can create and therefore the number of sites that can be connected at once.

Where the original O3b satellites featured just 12 steerable parabolic antennae offering 1.6Gbps per beam (800Mbps per direction), the mPower units are equipped with phased array antennas that can provide up to 5,000 beams per satellite, providing from 50Mbps up to 10Gbps.

Phased arrays are computer-controlled antennas that create a beam of radio waves that can be electronically steered without moving the antennas. According to the company, this means multiple companies can have real-time, uncontested high bandwidth, point-to-point connections between multiple sites.

“We can now cater the beam location, the beam configuration, and the amount of bandwidth in that beam to the actual requirements of the application and that specific customer,” says Wehbe, “which is a significant level of flexibility when compared to [the first generation] O3b.”

This means telecoms companies can backhaul multiple sites to a single aggregation point; enterprises can directly connect remote mining, manufacturing, or oil rig sites to the cloud; and data center

operators can link multiple facilities as a backup to fiber routes.

“A telco could have 100 cell sites where they want to extend their 5G Network. They could connect all the various sites, land it at their own gateway at the central data center, service every single remote site out there,” says Wehbe. “They would control a fully private satellite-based network end-to-end, no public Internet involved. And that kind of thing is a very powerful capability for cellular operators, large enterprises, and governments.”

SES says MEOs high orbit provides a wide area of view which means data can be transferred in a single hop via satellite to any other point on the continent at lower latencies than GEO, and in some cases even LEO.

The company claims mPower’s latency will be around 150 milliseconds, much lower than GEO’s (700 milliseconds). SES claims that while LEO can in theory offer as little as 50 milliseconds of latency, each satellite’s field of view means latency can build up quickly as signals are relayed over multiple satellites and terrestrial points to reach the final intended destination.

Point-to-point private 5G

So far, four of the 11 planned mPower satellites have launched. Four more are due to launch this year, with six satellites providing enough coverage to start global services in Q3 2023. Customers already signed up to mPower include Orange, Microsoft, and Reliance Jio.

During a demo at SES’ Betzdorf labs, the company showed a number of live use cases.

One, involving NTT, saw the companies create a live 5G network connected via satellite to the cloud. An NTT private 5G 'network in a box' provide coverages to an area [oil rig, mining site, port, etc]; the network then communicates with an SES satellite, which can then connect that site either to another 5G site for a fully private connection that doesn’t touch the public Internet, or directly to an on-premise or cloud data center.

Part of the demo saw a real-time digital twin of a simulated oil created with an onpremise Azure Stack deployment beamed directly from Betzdorf via satellite to an Azure cloud region.

Announced in 2022, NTT’s network in a box is still currently in the proof of concept stage. The company has previously said the box can provide coverage across a 5,00010,000 square foot area. Azure Stack is Microsoft’s on-premise appliance, offering a limited number of cloud services at the Edge that connect back to the parent cloud region.

“MEO is close enough to the Earth and we can push and pull significant bandwidth,” says Karl Horne, VP, telco/MNO data solutions at SES, “So it has a bandwidth symmetry capability that's important in cloud networking, Edge-to-core, and EastWest networking.”

MEO is still high up enough that it has a reasonable footprint of coverage. So it has an advantage there that it can actually

bypass an awful lot of terrestrial networking in a single hop.

Satellite terminal options vary, but even the smaller units can offer 500Mbps down and 200Mbps up, with either a built-in modem or a rack-based modem. Sites serving as an aggregation point for multiple satellite-connected locations might require larger gateways capable of gigabit-capacity throughput.

Satellites come for fiber to connect to the data center

While the company is clearly enthused by the possibilities of being a bridge between private 5G sites – Horne says there are maybe 1,000 such sites globally today but there could be 10,000 by 2026 – there’s a significant opportunity in the data center space.

A number of cloud providers including Amazon and Microsoft have struck deals to place ground stations at data centers around the world. To date, these have been more focused on aggregating data collected from satellites – for example Earth observation information – and delivering it straight to the cloud for processing. But Horne notes that the higher bandwidth of modern satellites offers a way for data centers to have point-to-point connectivity that doesn’t rely on fiber.

“When we talk about data center networking, we can cover so much of the Earth, the true end-to-end performance is not that different from what you would do with a fiber connection because you're

not having to traverse a bunch of router networks.”

“We've had some of the cloud solution engineers say, "I can’t tell the difference when I'm running over your network versus fiber.’ It is very much like fiber in the sky.”

SES has deals in place with Microsoft and AWS; the latter is offering containerized data centers to the US government that are equipped with terminals to link back to a primary cloud region via satellite. But SES is also offering services directly to data center firms as a resiliency play.

“Nothing will ever replace fiber as the thing that delivers that capacity,” says Horne, “but fiber still can be vulnerable. We've done some projects with some of the cloud service providers on their own infrastructure and how we can harden that.

“As they start building out more regional or Edge data centers, it helps bring them online quicker, but be much more survivable, too.

Whereas the first wave of data center customers are the cloud providers focused on "survivability of cloud services,’ Horne says the next wave of data center customers could be the colocation firms looking to ensure "more survivable networking services,’ but the company isn’t seeing the demand for that yet.

“The first actors are the full-service cloud service operators, because their underlying objective is continuity with the cloud services,” he says. “It’s very important for them to keep that highly available for their customers.”

SES has previously said that the O3b orbit and Ka-band frequencies have room for more than 100 satellites if business prospects justified the expansion. In terms of gateways for data centers – especially at cloud facilities – Horne says he would like to see more colocation of satellite infrastructure in densely-populated developing markets such as India.

MEO a carrier-grade LEO

SES claims its MEO services offer "carriergrade’ resiliency and five-9s level SLAs and bandwidth symmetry, compared to "best effort’ services from LEO providers.

Some OneWeb resellers do actually offer SLAs to customers on the basis of GB delivery guarantee per day, up to 99 percent at measurements of five-minute intervals. Starlink does not offer SLAs at this point.

The likes of Starlink, OneWeb, AST SpaceMobile, and Lynk are beginning to offer satellite direct-to-cell services to telcos. But rather than consumer-serving offerings, SES is focused on serving telcos for backhaul, enterprises for large remote deployments, and cloud providers in need of resiliency.

“There is a place for everybody and LEO has a role to play, but LEO and MEO are different niches,” says SES’ Wehbe “We are not really interested in the end customers because we are working with a B2B type of commercial model.”

He says that while the 150Mbps down, 20Mbps up via LEO might be fine for consumers and some enterprise use cases, it isn’t what the telcos, governments, and cloud providers of the world demand.

“Carrier-grade is very high throughput, symmetric capabilities, guaranteed services 99.99999 percent of the time. That's not what OneWeb's selling and that's not what Starlink is selling.”

“We empower the Vodafones and the Claros of the world so, in turn, they can go and deploy connectivity.

“We allow our customers to have their own private virtual networks within their country. The traffic never leaves the country, and they have full control of the network and what they're doing with it, how they assign bandwidth. And this is the level of control you don't get from the LEOs.”

When asked if SES might invest in LEO satellites in the future, Wehbe said the company “might,” but reinforced they are "different fields of connectivity with different requirements." 

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