To compete in the evolving communications market, satellite operators must provide faster, more reliable and more advanced services. One of the methods for meeting this need is the flexible satellite, which allows operators to better control the signal, footprint and content of their satellite, providing for a more competitive offering.

The concept of the flexible satellite means different things to different companies, but at its heart, flexibility provides satellite operators with better fleet planning and backup options, a more standardized and efficient procurement process and the possibility of early entry into new markets. “The flexible satellite is the answer to the operator’s growing need to find new potential business cases to develop their business,” says Patrick Agnieray, vice president of marketing for Alcatel Alenia Space. “That would translate into being able to address quickly a new opportunity which may be small in size or uncertain in size or location on the surface of the Earth. The operators may also want to launch as quickly as possible or even configure the satellite on orbit. This also enables new types of missions, which are needed because the satellite operators have to deal with competition from other technologies and need to be able to provide new types of coverages with more flexibility of traffic allocation.”

For Fixed Satellites Services (FSS) providers, a flexible satellite could be placed in any orbital slot and be reconfigured to meet the needs of that slot, says Chris Hoeber, senior vice president, program management & systems engineering, Space Systems/Loral. “It could mean something different to direct broadcast satellites, who are seeing the need for spot beams for local area coverage versus national beams. Flexibility also has an impact for broadband and mobile services. … Flexibility saves money, and any one of those things means you put up one satellite instead of two or better tailor capacity to meet demand and provide better service.”

Replacing Bent Pipe

The majority of satellites in orbit today are traditional bent pipe satellites designed to provide a specific service to a specific area of the globe, says Max Engal, broadband and satellite industry analysts for Frost and Sullivan’s Information & Communication Technologies sector. This is accomplished through manufacturing processes such as shaping the antenna to control the beam to cover its intended land mass, and once this is done, the beam cannot be reshaped. “The coverage is hardwired and is never going to work quite as well anywhere else,” he says. “The important thing to understand is that this is not a matter of turning circuits on. The antenna is a hunk of metal and it is what it is and that’s not changing,” he says.

The flexible satellite concept has been around for years but not necessarily under that term, says Bruno Perrot, senior manager, technology development, for SES Global. “There were flexible initiatives in the early 90s, and I think at that time, the technology was not mature enough,” he says. “I think it is back again on the scene because the technology is at a level of maturity where we can consider bringing it into space with minimum risk. I would tend to say that 10 to 15 years ago, the technology was feasible but a risk for commercial operators. Today the risk is at a minimum.”

There are a few different approaches to developing satellites that can provide this flexibility, says Engal. One is the phased array antenna, in which a traditional antenna is replaced with a series of elements that are electronically tunable, which provides the same capability as the disc of the traditional antenna. “This way you have a completely tailorable beam,” he says. “If you move, you don’t have to be concerned. … Boeing offers the phased array that also theoretically gives you some finer control over your coverage. You are not just mapping the land mass. It gives you control. You can exclude some places you don’t care about.”

Another approach is to place multiple spot beams on the satellite rather than using a large antenna that provides for wide coverage, says Engal. Space Systems/Loral, Lockheed Martin, Alcatel, and EADS Astrium all prefer this approach, which is favored by operators that offer consumer satellite services. It means that the companies can tailor coverage by “essentially creating more beams in principal than one can use in practice,” he says. “It allows you to put two beams over here and not put one there. It’s not terribly useful just to turn off ones over certain areas without being able to redirect that capacity.”

Space Systems/Loral is building satellites for ICO and Terrestar — two of the companies that plan to provide Mobile Satellite Services using ancilliary terrestrial technology — and the systems will use ground-based beamforming to provide service. “How it’s implemented is proprietary, but it’s state of the art. It allows you to put down 100 beams or 1,000 beams or 1 million beams to cover the geographic requirement of the satellite. It allows you to take a frequency and reassign it to one beam to another. This is done with computers on the ground, and that’s very effective.”

Flexibility also can be achieved through software improvements that allow for more onboard processing, which enables the satellite to do some of the work of routing the signal onboard the spacecraft rather than having the signal bounced up and down between the satellite and ground stations multiple times. “Onboard processing saves a hop, which does wonders for things like latency,” says Engal. “This calls for a lot of intelligence on the satellite, or at least a lot of control,” says Engal. “It just gets more complicated. Any way you look at it, a flexible satellite means you can better control the coverage instead of having a satellite where the coverage is hardwired.”

Some of the operators also have their own versions of flexibility. Intelsat, the world’s largest FSS company, has what it refers to as the flexible network or flexible arc, says George Giagtzoglou, the company’s senior vice president for corporate development. “By addressing an arc of say 30 degrees, we can look at options to optimize capacity (through grooming) to meet a specific customer’s need, and in the event of an anomaly react quickly to secure service continuity (in many cases). We would define it as the ability to offer in-orbit versatility and new applications that benefit the customer, enabling optimal business growth. … Through Intelsat’s flexible satellite network, we can adapt to provide higher quality service as our customers need it; geographically repoint our spot beams as business needs change over time; and to some degree, provide frequency flexibility — or cross-strap solutions.”

Business Advantages

Using technology that provides some form of flexibility is becoming more popular in the industry because operators need to minimize the risk to their business case in the event changes must be made after the satellite is in orbit. “In the years before, operators had more or less had same business case, but now all have specifics,” says Agnieray. “They have specific customer types or a spread of services among different customers, so not all operators are looking for the same type of satellite.”

The varying demands for satellites mean that manufacturers must have the capability to provide not only the simple bent pipe satellites but also spacecraft with varying degrees of flexibility, says Agnieray. “What is necessary now is to provide some simple flexibility today and progressively develop more flexible technology to obtain more flexibility,” he says.

 “Operators are looking for some type of flexibility right now. Basically, these technologies will enable new business models later on. … Those operators on a lower budget are more bound to want traditional satellites, whereas operators that have large fleets that want to move satellites around or have sufficient financial assets to open up new services at new orbital slots or are looking to mitigate the risk of new orbital services are looking at adding some flexibility so they can change their business model if needed.”

According to Engal, flexibility is more important as the number of sites the operator is dealing with increases. “If all you are doing is taking a signal from New York and putting it down in Paris, flexibility does not make a lot of difference to you,” he says. “The question in today’s satellite market is how many people are just doing this. My answer is that it’s becoming less and less important. As operators do things like video distribution to a lot of different sites, flexibility becomes very relevant. DTH operators clearly want flexibility to hit different towns with their own local programming.

That’s probably also true for video distribution for those who want to have control over who gets what and for data and voice distribution to specific locations. These up-and-coming applications are mostly smarter applications than the old bent pipe scenario.”

Impact On Manufacturing Sector

The flexible satellite also can provide a competitive advantage for the satellite manufacturer, says Agnieray. “We see new competition coming from low-cost entrants, so we have to find some differentiation in marketing terms,” he says. “If we can provide higher value technology, that’s the way we have to go. We can’t just compete on manufacturing cost. … We are putting partial flexible payloads in satellites that customers can use and test with respect to their business cases.

 With that approach, we can master the technology progressively and can take the assembly times down and also the cost down for that application. The way we introduce flexibility, it is roughly the same price as before. If we want to introduce a little bit more and make it a little bit more expensive, you could introduce full flexibility. But for the moment the business case doesn’t figure for the operators.”

Space Systems/Loral offers its customers varying degrees of flexibility options as well. “The technology exists but it’s still expensive,” says Hoeber. “People are talking about it now commercially because the costs are coming down. If anybody were to build a satellite with a channelizer and a phased array antenna, it would take longer and cost more than a traditional satellite. But it is changing and the engineering will make advancements where that is no longer true, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

But the technology advancements will come, says Engal. “Today’s complex is tomorrow’s simple,” he says  “There was a time it was hard to build a Boeing 376. All of these things have a life cycle; 601s used to be the state of the art. In principal, it takes longer to build more flexible satellites, but that is always true for the cutting edge technologies and always more risky. In 10 years, onboard processing may be the way you do everything and may be simple. Flexible satellite may not be slower than other satellites because, in part, nobody is ordering bent pipe satellites. Harder, slower and more reliable and riskier are all context dependent. The Boeing 376 was the most reliable satellite ever, but there is still no market for them today.”

The advancement of flexible technology could make those satellites even quicker to develop than traditional satellites as well as less expensive. “Reconfigurable, or flexible, satellites have the potential to alter current procurement time frames,” says Giagtzoglou. “If demand for such hardware rises, then a manufacturer can have such a satellite in its inventory, or in process, which would make it no longer a special order payload but a [commercial-off-the-shelf] payload. With the ability to use standardized components, this would impact construction time and possibly cost. But I think flexible satellites have to be in relatively high demand for such a paradigm shift to occur in the manufacturing industry.”

While manufacturers still are developing the current generation of flexible technology and operators are discovering the best ways to take advantage of the new capabilities, work already is being done to develop next-generation flexibility.

 “We have started working on the potential for a full flexible satellite,” says Agnieray. “All the models that would be produced would be identical and be tailored just before launch or on orbit for their specific mission. It’s a nice concept, but in the end it did not make enough business sense at this time. It may be one of the alleys that may be walked down in that respect to full flexibility.”

“I think the future could be in advanced satellites that are entirely reconfigurable in orbit — beam shapes, frequencies, connectivity, and to some extent power levels — allowing optimal flexibility to serve evolving customer needs as business changes,” says Giagtzoglou. “At present, we operate satellites that are designed and built years before we understand the customer needs. Future developments may focus on making satellites faster to market, cheaper through standardization, smarter and even more flexible.”