The World Teleport Association (WTA) has released SD-WAN for Competitive Advantage and Revenue Growth, a new research report that explores with teleport, satellite and technology executives their tips, tricks and use cases that demonstrate the potential of SD-WAN to help teleport operators adapt to today’s rapid changes in capabilities and customer requirements.
WTA members can access the report by signing into their accounts on the WTA website. The report is free for WTA Members and available for purchase by others. Members may directly download the report by following this link and logging in with their user name and password.
A technology executive summed it up — “The biggest customer need is better availability. SD-WAN provides additional resiliency to communications networks because you have virtual connection to wherever – satellite, 5G, GEO, LEO. Thanks to the combination of the different paths, we can reach 99.99 percent availability or higher. We can even do high-bandwidth L-band with maritime customers by bonding four links. When you’re in the middle of the ocean in a storm, you appreciate knowing at least one of those links will be available, no matter what.”
“The value of a service is different from customer to customer,” another technology executive noted. “An energy customer is looking for high availability. Commercial maritime vessel wants to get as much internet service to crew and passenger as possible for an affordable cost. Being able to bring a portfolio of options and using SD-WAN to tune it to meet their need – that’s how you win the business.”
Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) architecture allows networks to combine different transport services into a virtual wide area network that adapts to changing availability and throughput. Widespread in terrestrial communications, it is being greeted in the satellite communications business as a potential game-changer for its power to deliver high reliability and quality of service while making more efficient use of bandwidth. But implementing SD-WAN is not only technically complex, it forces ground segment operations to adopt a digital-first mindset.
In this report, WTA explores with engineering and operations executives their tips, tricks and use cases that demonstrate the near-term value and long-term potential of SD-WAN to generate competitive advantage and accelerated revenue growth.
“For decades, satellite service providers have sold their services in well-defined siloes, dictated by the uniqueness of our technology and the limits it imposed,” said executive director Robert Bell. “SD-WAN is lifting those limits so that, whatever complexity is happening in the network, customers get what they really want: seamless access to the capacity they need. The challenge for our industry is to leverage that capability as much as possible and as fast as possible to seize the opportunities it offers.”
