At the British Interplanetary Society’s 2014 Reinventing Space conference, the presentation on satellite-based free-space optics consisted of two people, talking about a potential future to come, should the right funding be found and crucial technological advances be made.
Two years later, the same panel was overflowing, with event organizers struggling to fit in placards with the speakers’ names, as representatives from around the world crammed the stage.
The message was clear: The industry had seen the light.
And, in that packed room in London, some argued that those in the data center industry would see it soon too.
“It has always been the tech of tomorrow, but it is ready now, for today,” said Dr Donald Cornwell, director of advanced comms and navigation at NASA.
The futuristic idea being discussed was that of using lasers to transmit data through free space, be it air or an actual vacuum, rather than through glass or some other medium. Data is beamed up from the ground to a satellite, then sent to another satellite, and back down to somewhere else in the world.
Until now, free-space optics has been the domain of the military, most notably in the form of the proposed $12-18 billion Transformational Satellite project that aimed to launch five satellites capable of transferring 10-40Gbps.
With the military facing budget cuts and ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, TSAT was canceled in 2009, but the work on the project did not go to waste.
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The result is a space-based Internet backhaul service with a capacity of 7.2 Tbps that hopes to go toe-to-toe with submarine cables. The high articulation laser optics (HALO) system supports software defined networks (SDN), enabling optical-satellite-as-a-service.“The way most data travels today is on submarine cables between continents, and the issue with that is it’s a developed market phenomenon – most of the cables run sort of East-West in the northern hemisphere before they go South,” said Jim Poole, VP of ecosystem business development at Equinix.
“So if you want to go from Argentina to South Africa, you have to go all the way up to North America, across the North Atlantic, and then down. There’s a lot of dog legs in the system. A direct beam that can go up from Argentina, hit a satellite, across to another satellite, then back down to South Africa, could take 60/70ms off the round trip time.”
Removing the various steps and winding pathways that make up a fiber network is not the only reason satellite networks can be faster – light travels roughly 31 percent slower through standard fiber optical cables than it does through a vacuum.
Even small improvements in latency are already proving enticing in transatlantic cables: “A lot of the banking industry bought capacity on the Hibernia Express at well above normal transatlantic market rates, just because Hibernia specialized in building a system that connected London to New York at far less latency, and they made quite a bit of money doing that,” Poole said. “So this is a very comparable scenario.”