 Good morning, afternoon everyone from Geneva to everybody and welcome to the second episode of ITU Satellite Webinars. My name is Jorge Sikorosi. I'm a senior engineer from the Space Services Department here at ITU. A few weeks ago, most of you participated in the first episode of the ITU Satellite Webinars that we dedicated to prevent interference through satellite systems. Our final analytics indicated that more than 1,500 participants from 121 countries have participated through different means, either the Zoom platform or from the ITU web or YouTube. We are expecting a similar forecast for this episode too of ITU Webinars or even more. So in fact, believe it or not, either you are working from home or from the office, certainly you are not going to be alone in the next two hours. So today we are dedicating this episode to NGSO large constellation, which are for broadband applications. And we'll count with the presence of the VR director, Mr. Mario Manewicz, the chief of the Space Services Department, Mr. Alexander Vallet, an expert and executive from the, I would say, the big five NGSO of today. Before going in these deep discussions and giving the floor to Mr. Manewicz, I will give you just a few practical announcements, let's say. This meeting is being recorded and webcasted through the ITU website and the video and the presentations will be posted in the event website and YouTube after the meeting. That will be for further consultations. And finally, let me tell you that we have just designed three polls with basic three questions, which we think are relevant to get your views, your insights of this field, and we'll share these results at the end of the webinar. So now let me give the floor to Mr. Mario Manewicz, the director of the R&D Communication Bureau, director. Yes, thank you, Jorge. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening to our distinguished speakers first, but also to all the participants who are joining this ITU webinar from around the world. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the second episode in the series of ITU satellite webinars. As you heard a few weeks ago, we hosted the first one dedicated to preventing interface interference to satellite systems, where we counted with distinguished speaker from the space sector and an impressive audience of 1500 participants who connected over different media platforms from 121 countries. Today's webinar is dedicated to non-GSOs at light constellations that are already operating, providing broadband communications, or are about to do so. Almost one year after WRC-19, during which intensive deliberations on the regulatory framework for such systems took place, I'm glad to see that the work of the conference will assist in providing more legal certainty for the operation of these projects. As you will know, the conference took a number of decisions in order to create a stable regulatory framework for the deployment of large non-GSO constellations, not only in the traditional KU and KA bands, but also in higher frequency bounds around 40 and 50 GHz, taking benefits of the latest advances in space technologies. An exhaustive technical regulatory mechanism was also put in place to protect other terrestrial and satellite systems, sharing the same frequency bands, and to ensure the compatibility between them, making an efficient use of the spectrum with the global frequency harmonization required by these non-GSO constellations, while benefiting of the consequent economies of scale that are gradually growing in this field as well. The Radio Communication Bureau is aware not only of the long-term efforts required in the coordination and deployment of satellite systems, but also on the benefit for the society and the key role they are playing to achieve the UN sustainable development goals. This is why it is very appropriate that we organize this webinar during the World Space Week, which theme this year is Satellites Improve Life. You will discover many examples today. In this context, uncounting with more than 50 years of experience in space regulations, the Radio Communication Bureau reiterates its commitment to provide all necessary technical regulatory assistance to the ITU members through its space services department, which is led by Mr. Alexander Valet, who is moderating the webinar today. Dear friends, we are proud to count on distinguished experts and organizations supporting these webinars, and a new as a valuable audience. Once again, I invite you to enjoy the webinar, participate actively in it, and more importantly, to apply the concepts that you will learn to enable the development of this fascinating field of satellite communications. Together, we can make reality our dream of bringing broadband connectivity to every corner of the world. Have a nice webinar. Thank you very much, director. And welcome to all the participants to this second episode, dedicated today to a non-GSO satellite system, and in fact, to non-GSO satellite systems that are going to provide broadband services. I'm Alexander Valet, the chief of the Space Services Department in the ITUBR. And I will start this webinar with a brief reminder of what the last World Radio Conference, WRC-19, decided on this field. So you can see that WRC-19 took two main decisions. The first one is to set up a new regulatory framework, or an improved regulatory framework, I should say, for non-GSO satellites in the 50-40-gigahertz range. The second one is the creation of a milestone-based deployment process that is aimed at avoiding spectrum warehousing by large non-GSO filings. Let me explain a little bit more. The first main achievement was about creating a regulatory framework that is both sustainable and, we hope, equitable for sharing between GSO and non-GSO satellite systems. So this new framework applies in the 50-40-gigahertz range, that is to say, between 37.5 and 51.1 gigahertz. And it is comprised of three main elements. The sharing between the GSO, FSS, BSS and MSS systems and non-GSO FSS systems is based on the adoption of two limits. So two technical limits. One, which is a single entry limit of 3% of degradation into a set of GSO reference links. And the second one, which is an aggregate limit of 10%, or 8%, depending on the case, to protect a set of GSO links together with more operational links. So you can see that the aim of the conference was to establish the sharing between GSO and non-GSO based on technical conditions, a priori technical conditions. On the counterpart, the conference established the sharing mechanism between or among the non-GSO, FSS and MSS systems by relying on the usual ITU coordination process. So for among non-GSO systems, it will be more based on discussion among actors. Of course, the sharing between GSO systems will continue to be based on the same ITU usual coordination process. And these three elements allow us to provide a complete framework for the two main components of the satellite system, GSO and non-GSO. This was complemented by a second achievement, which was a process to monitor the deployment of non-GSO large constellation. As you may know, when you want to use a frequency in space, you have to register it with ITU. And to do that, you send what we called an ITU satellite filing. This ITU satellite filing contains the details of what you plan to operate, and you have to bring in to use this filing within seven years from the start of your request. This seven-year limit is aimed at preventing requests to hold forever. What WRC-19 decided was to give a clear definition to the concept of bringing in to use. For example, for a GSO system, bringing in to use a GSO system is quite obvious. You have to put a GSO satellite to bring in to use the system. But for non-GSO constellation, what does it mean? Do you have to deploy the entire constellation or just a part of it, just one? And this is all the discussion and all the solutions that were provided by WRC-19. So WRC-19 decided two things. First, the bring in to use, the first point is to be done with at least one satellite. And this satellite has to be operated in one notified orbital plane for at least 90 days. Of course, this is not enough to keep your filing alive, your rights alive. You have to continue the deployment at a steady pace. And this pace was decided also by WRC-19. And it says that you have to deploy at least 10% of your constellation within two years after the end of the seven-year period, then 50% within five years, and then you have to complete deployment by seven years. So you have 14 years to complete your deployment, and you have to meet the two intermediate milestones. An important point is that the penalty, if you don't meet the milestone, is not a complete loss of all your rights, but simply a reduction of your rights proportional to what you have deployed. So let's take an example. You have filed in ITU for a constellation of 100 satellites. You are able, after seven years, to bring in to use one. So you keep your filing of 100 satellites. Then after two years, after the seven years, you deploy 10 satellites. So you meet the 10%. So you keep your filing as it is. But then, unfortunately, within five years, after the seven-year period, you are only able to deploy 40. So in fact, you have not made the 50% milestone. Well, you don't lose everything. What you lose is the difference between what you have done and what you should have done. So basically, what you are allowed now is to deploy only 80 satellites. That is to say, twice the number that you have deployed at milestone two. And the reason for that is that if you have met milestone two, that is to say 50, then you have also the right to put in orbit twice the number of satellites. That would be the complete constellation. So the idea is to simply scale down your rights to what corresponding to the efforts you have made. This process of milestones, it applies to FSS, MSS and BSS systems in some frequency bands, many KU, K and QV bands. And it has formally legally entered into force at the end of the conference. But the first step that will be important to meet will be on the 1st of January, 2021, when some of the initial filings will have to give to ITU their deployment plans. This process was agreed at the conference with also a number of transitional measures that are very important and that have been adopted to address all the cases of non-JSO systems that were in fact brought into use either before the conference or before the 1st of January, 2021. I will not go into the details of these transitional measures during this presentation, but you may know that ITU has published the radio regulations of the 2020 edition last month. So I really encourage you to go on our website and download the 2020 edition of this radio regulations. And then you can look in detail to a resolution called Resolution 35, which gives all the details of this milestone process and all the exceptions, the transitional measures and so on. So this is an interesting read. This is about 10 pages of regulatory wording. It's either good for sleep or good for work. Probably not so much for leisure. But I really encourage you to download the regulation and look in details to this part of the regulations to really understand the details of the decision of the WRC 90. Now what is the objective of today's webinar is to hear from the five main non-JSO constellation proponents. First, the status of their projects because they have various projects that are well in shape and we will hear from each of them where they are, what their immediate next steps are. And also we will discuss whether the decision of the WRC 19 affects positively or negatively their operations. We will also try to address what is lacking or what should be done in addition to facilitate and to help this project to come into friction and to provide interesting new services to all our fellow citizens. So let me start first with Patricia Cooper. She's the Vice President for Satellite Government Affairs in SpaceX and she has led the SpaceX Global Satellite Government Affairs since 2015. Welcome Patricia. So Patricia is directing the regulatory strategy and policy activities for the Starlink Satellite Constellation which many of you are certainly aware is the SpaceX Next Generation Satellite Network capable of connecting the globe with reliable and affordable broadband service. Patricia is a well-known person in the satellite industry. She has led the Satellite Industry Association for seven years before joining SpaceX. She has also worked at IntelSat or PanamSat and she also held various senior positions at the FCC International Bureau. She I would say she is very well accustomed to our regulatory discussion because she has not only had an influential role in the U.S. process but she has also participated to many ITU-WRC conferences. So before giving the floor to Patricia in fact we will show a brief video that SpaceX provided us and then I will give Patricia the opportunity to explain to us the status of the SpaceX project. Six, five, four, three, two, one. Very good. So Patricia with such an introduction I think there is a lot of expectation about what you will say. There we go. Well you asked us to show what we were doing so I thought we'd go ahead and just show it in videos. Thank you so much Alexandra for starting this conference and Mario for all the VR, for convening us and bringing us together. It's wonderful to see everyone and be on the panel with my colleagues in the NGSO adventures. Conversations like this make us kind of miss Sharma shake a little bit and the prep sessions and the CICG it's good to see everyone. I'm glad we're keeping well and kind of pushing on with the usual work. I also wanted to just say I want to recognize the ITU they sort of top to bottom for organizing not just this panel but across the board. They've really shown an extraordinary dedication and inventiveness in keeping the wheels moving throughout this pandemic despite all the disruptions and worries that it brings. So I'm impressed and grateful for the the satellite teams especially and I hope we're doing you proud by putting all that deliberation and analysis and processing time towards some real tangible use. For SpaceX you can see from the video that we've been busy this past year. The highlight was certainly for us carrying NASA astronauts Bob Bankin and Doug Early to the International Space Station May and then safely home. That mission completed our final tests under a NASA contract that will now turn towards more regular crewed missions to and from the International Space Station using our Falcon 9 rocket and our Dragon crew capsule. For a company whose mission is human space exploration that was a powerful milestone for us all. But we're here to discuss Starlink and share its progress to date and how the WRC and its decisions are interplaying with that. I will note a little intersection with the astronaut mission. Yesterday we launched 60 more Starlink satellites and that launch used the same first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that sent Doug and Bob to the ISS in May. It had been used for an additional mission in between so that was our third reuse. In fact Starlink has been the life leader for launch reusability. We're now on sixth reuse of certain boosters and the first fifth and first sixth reuse of those first stages were for Starlink missions as well as the first reflung fairings. So Alexander really asked us to do two things. Give a little update on the project and comment on the WRC-19. So I'm going to try and do this by talking about the status of the space layer and the ground layer and services and link those to the WRC decisions and maybe other questions that may still be ahead of us. I'll just note that none of this actual information about Starlink is new. We've put an enormous amount of information to the public already. We've got fairly in-depth public filings and comments, press articles, of course social media. So this kind of gathering and reshaping of that public information can illustrate where Starlink stands and how the work is related to our ongoing advancement. So for the constellation itself you'll recall that we have a constellation of 4,400 some satellites. We have to date as of yesterday launched 753 of our Starlink satellites. It is striking. It's really struck me that at the beginning of the conference last year in Charm we had only launched 60. So it's been a big deployment push for us. We've hit a cadence in the manufacturing of the satellites which we do ourselves. We're building about 120 a month right now. And leveraging the reuse of our rockets we're aiming for about two launches a month although of late the Florida weather reminds us that mother nature has a pretty big say in that goal. At the WRC this correlates directly to the milestones decisions that Alexandra mentioned at the outset. The transition from a single satellite to bring into use and the decision to add deployment milestones for NGSO. So as a U.S. licensed constellation we already had deployment milestones in the context of our U.S. license. So we supported the idea that is an international approach. We probably would have liked even faster expectations for build out but certainly understand these are enormously complicated projects that require financing, manufacturing, design, launch, business approach, etc. All that can take time. We want our fellow NGSOs to succeed. We've designed our system to expect many NGSOs. And we actually hope to launch them. We're launching at least one of our panel members here and many other from our processing round class at the FCC and hope that we'll have the opportunity to deploy more. And of course with over 700 satellites in place for a constellation of 4,000 some we've already surpassed the initial milestone of 10% well before that deadline and are building on to the next. So in addition to that space layer of the constellation and satellite deployment we've been looking at gateways which for us are in KA band and building a network of gateways sitting on good fiber that can support the traffic of our constellation for users. There perhaps the most notable piece is that the spectrum is spectrum sharing with terrestrial. I note that the conference did not take up new allocations for 5G in 28 gigahertz in the KA band. And despite no decisions there I would just say that in various countries we are looking at opportunities to test the way that NGSO KA band gateways can coexist and share spectrum with existing or planned terrestrial networks whether those are microwave networks or the emerging 5G. We're seeing explorations of that in the US and elsewhere. We're big proponents of flexible technology for the satellite systems and of course with the terrestrial systems so that we can share spectrum and coexist and both operate. I'll move on to the sort of general spectrum use just noting that the directors reported reiterated the importance of operator to operator coordination that set good expectations for us all to work together and talk. And I think across the panel many of us if not all of us are in that mix now with much clearer specifics of what our systems are what will fly and what those capabilities are. That coordination process is yielding some good important discussions on what the right principles are about how we interoperate the respective capabilities and where we intersect. And I'm glad to see that reinforcement of operator operator talks as the NGSO world becomes even more populated with more folks hoping to leverage this kind of platform for various services. We believe that operator operator talks and coordinations are the right path to ensure spectrum efficiency which at the end of the day is the way that you get more services to citizens. I want to pick up just briefly on the V-Band decision. I would pair that topic that Alexander you raised with some of the work that's been going on with K-A-Band ECIMS and just saying I think we're refreshing a little bit the mechanisms and the approach that we're using for EPFD both the tools and the approaches on how NGSO systems can protect the geosystems above and other services like the passive earth observation systems. That fresh look I think is something we're going to want to take into the next conference and consider continue to look at ways to update the tools that the BR has to analyze and examine and that we all have to evaluate to make sure we can still protect the services that require protection but also capture upgraded RF technology that many of us are investing in and fielding. And then finally for us the user terminals and service the other part of the ground network we're already deploying and beta testing service internally for friends and family and have been since summer. We haven't released full results from those yet but we have filed public information about those tests with the FCC and we're pleased with the performance we've been regularly testing above 100 megabits per second and showing latencies below 40. There'll be more information to come there. Our next stage will be to open a public beta service in the U.S. and then onwards internationally and then of course matching that with higher volume user terminal production. And if anyone's interested in tracking this or seeing when it'll be available near you we've opened up a sign up on Starlink.com to do that. So for us I think we just say we're really pleased at the progress we've had this last year this has been a busy year since we were all at charm. We're eager to put the parameters and the provisions that we agreed upon at WRC to practical use continue to build out our constellation and roll out actual service. There's much more to do we for us generally and also broadly we want to make sure that the planning and discussions and all enable innovation that basically every company on this panel is fielding and proposing but also give confidence to the other spectrum users on space and in space and on the ground of the appropriate RF protections. So that's my report at a year in date. Thank you. Thanks a lot Patricia. Very interesting indeed. I noticed that in the Q&A we have a number of questions about the SpaceX and maybe I will take a first one is do SpaceX has some plan to support non-terrestrial 3GPP standards for 5G or will you more use your own standard? So there's nothing in our system that wouldn't support 3GPP. We don't plan at this point to be an interface directly with a cell phone or a laptop but we could certainly feed a cell tower or a small cell. Okay. And I think the latencies that we're seeing are validating that. Yeah we certainly with this kind of latencies is certainly feasible. Another question that is coming is what about inter-satellite links? Do you think they are useful? They are necessary? They are absolutely a muster or do you think that constellation can live without them? What is the view of SpaceX about inter-satellite links? Yeah we've planned inter-satellite links since the very beginning for our satellites to talk to each other in space with using optical inter-satellite links. We in fact we just announced on our previous launch some early tests that we've been doing with very high volume transfer between satellites. So we do expect that that will be a feature that we integrate. Our approach on satellites has been on the satellite design has been to continue to iterate and the first satellites don't look like the last one so this is definitely an upgrade for network management that's on the horizon. I will say that they are not essential but there are parts of the world where it's difficult to get a gateway nearby in the ocean or in truly remote areas that are otherwise not served so ISLs can not only help with managing traffic directly from point to point but also to reach locations where the kind of gateway construct doesn't work. Okay, thank you. I know many questions from the Q&A. One of them concerned the famous brightness of these basic satellites and we know that you have since the beginning since you were alerted from this problem worked on that so maybe if you can spend one or two minutes to give us the status we know we have seen in the past many improvements in this field but how do you envisage the continuation of this issue astronomers? Right, so this has been about a year and a half a very close dialogue with the astronomy community primarily the optical astronomy community since of course the radio astronomy community is already part of the ITU spectrum family and those coordination are sort of already in place but the the two communities of optical astronomy and communication satellites really had been quite separate and neither was particularly well informed about the other and I think that's really changed partly because the first tranche of satellites that we launched were surprisingly bright for us, for everyone else. So we undertook a year of learning and ultimately mitigations in collaboration with a group of really dedicated astronomers. In fact, this week there's a conference called the Dark and Quiet Skies Conference that's put on with the by the International Astronomical Union and they'll come out with some measurements of some of those mitigations. So what we've done is we've taken a good deal of time to understand about our satellites what makes them bright, visible to the naked eye first and then also to various kinds of observatories and what can be done to reduce those impacts. So we set out two goals. One of them is to make the satellites generally invisible to the naked eye unaided within about a week of launch. And for that we've addressed that with primarily with operational roles as the satellites have been deployed and are going up to orbit. And then the other is to minimize the impact on telescopes, optical astronomy telescopes by darkening the satellites or shielding them from the from the suns that they don't saturate the observatory detectors. And that is basically measured with a variety of tools but a magnitude of how they how bright they appear. And the report with the dark and quiet skies this week has quite a few measurements in it of those fielded experiments. So with this learning we came up with first one solution dark sat which was just to darken the elements and then a shielding which is a shield like a sunshade to reduce the brightness at on orbit. So we think we're in a good path there but I'd encourage you all to take a look at the results of this conference this week and also for all the other satellite operators out there to learn about the astronomy community and how your satellites design and operations might affect the optical astronomy community will be encouraging folks to participate who's glad to see Kuiper and OneWeb join in those conversations too. Thanks a lot Patricia. We may have further questions at the end of the panel but I'm now proposing that we move to the second panelist Miss Zoller thank you again. So Miss Zoller is the head of the Global Regulatory Affairs at the Amazon's Project Cooper as you may know this project is an initiative to launch a constellation of LIO satellites that will provide low latency and high-speed broadband connectivity and as such Julie Zoller is responsible for enabling and protecting Kuiper's use of the radio frequency spectrum. Before joining Amazon Miss Zoller was the Chief Government Affairs at Omnispace but also she served four years at the State Department the US State Department as a Senior Deputy Coordinator for International Communications Affairs. Before that she has a long career in the space and industry as well as in the US administration. I will not go into all details to let her a little bit of time to present the status of the Amazon Project Cooper so Julie you have now the floor. Thank you very much Alexander and thank you Mr. Director opportunity to participate in this webinar and to share some information about Project Kuiper and our plans for delivering global broadband service. Let me take the chance to extend my best wishes to all colleagues as we work through the challenges of this global pandemic. I hope you're all healthy and take pride in being part of a community that is uniquely equipped to enable connectivity options that are essential to working, studying and sheltering at home. So I have some slides and I believe Jorge is going to manage that. Great. So what is Project Kuiper? It's an Amazon initiative to deliver high speed, low latency, broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved individual households as well as schools, hospitals, businesses and other organizations without reliable broadband through a constellation of over 3,000 satellites in low earth orbit. I'm speaking to you from a remote area in northern New York where the only option I have for internet access is my smartphone. The need for connectivity especially in rural areas like mine is real. This pandemic has only highlighted the digital divide and the need for solutions. As I mentioned, Project Kuiper is a long term initiative and the team is making incredible progress. We've already marked a few important milestones this year. In July the FCC granted our license. We're hiring and growing quickly, assembling a team of world-class scientists and engineers to deliver on this vision. While my team is in the Washington DC area, most of the Kuiper team is in Redmond, Washington where we have an over 20,000 square meter state of the art facility that will serve as the primary headquarters for research and development and early manufacturing. Amazon plans to invest more than $10 billion to build and scale our ground network, accelerate satellite testing and manufacturing and deliver an affordable customer terminal that will make fast, reliable broadband accessible. So let's go to the next slide please. What is the Project Kuiper architecture? Let me start with the satellites. We'll have 3,236 satellites at 3 altitudes and inclinations, 630, 610 and 590 kilometer altitudes at 52, 42 and 33 degree inclinations. That will allow us to provide service from 56 North to 56 South latitude continuously. The satellites will have phased array antennas that produce small steerable spot beams for serving customers. Because of our low orbits and Kuiper's high-tech antennas, we'll provide fiber-like service with high speeds, high capacity and low latency. We're going to build and deploy the constellation in five phases starting with the highest altitude, highest inclination shell. In phase one, we plan to launch 578 satellites. This is half the satellites in the 630 kilometer shell and enough to start service. In phase two, we'll begin to populate the shell at 610 kilometers and we'll continue building out through the five phases when all 3,000 satellites will be operational. We're an all-Ka-band system with downlinks in the 17.7 to 18.6 and 18.8 to 20.2 gigahertz bands and uplinks in the 27.5 to 30 gigahertz band. The satellite and ground stations are only part of what it takes to build a global network. Much of the effort happens on the ground. Moving and storing data securely, delivering terminals to customers' homes and businesses, customer service and billing, all important aspects of the satellite broadband business and customer experience and areas where Amazon has extensive knowledge. Let's go to the last slide. ITU's work is vitally important to Project Kuiper and the advancement of NGF SO systems in general, which involve questions of a worldwide character that are the focus of World Radio Communication Conferences. Working Party 4A's foundational work on recommendations and reports in this area is also important. So I want to look to the future and the WRC 23 agenda items that I'd like to highlight today. And the first is agenda item seven on the filing process for satellite networks, advanced publication, coordination and notifications. The article 21 PFD scaling factor for NGSOs in the frequency band 17.7 to 19.3 gigahertz needs to be updated to take into account larger constellations, which weren't envisioned 20 years ago when the equations were adopted. Another issue under agenda item seven is establishing orbital tolerance parameters for NGSOs and alignment between notified and deployed orbital characteristics, which affects our understanding of bringing into use, meeting deployment milestones and sharing. And finally, there's the NGSO post milestone deployment reporting and ensuring that the content of the master register is aligned with what's on orbit. I'd also like to mention agenda item 1.16, which deals with NGSO earth stations in motion in the KA band and aims to enable the type of mobility applications, which are in high demand. Working Party 4A does vital work outside of the work preparatory process. We're working on updating the recommendation that contains the functional description for the software tool used to determine NGSO compliance with EPFD limits. The goal of this work is to revise recommendation 1503 to more accurately model today's NGSO systems, which ultimately improves the efficient use of the radio frequency spectrum. We also need to make sure that the EPFD validation software stays up to date with the specification. And finally, I'll mention NGSO sharing issues arising from resolution 769 adopted by work 19. Here there's a need to develop the mechanism for assessing aggregate interference from NGSO systems, taking into account realistic modeling and sharing parameters. So with that, I'll end my presentation today and I'm happy to take some questions. Thank you very much, Julie. It's a very interesting and informative presentation. I see some question from the Q&A from the audience. So let's jump to them directly. A very similar question as for SpaceX is that what are the plans of the project creeper with regard to supporting the 3GPP standards for non-terrestrial networks? Do you plan to do so or do you simply plan to have backhaul capacities? All right, that's a good question. Our plan is to backhaul capacity for mobile network. Thanks a lot. Another question is why are you not so interested to cover the polls? I would say this is the constellation design that we're starting with but as with all of Amazon innovation is always at the forefront of our thinking and certainly covering the polls is a possibility for the future. So stay tuned. I have no announcements today but... Okay, thank you very much. And also I read some similar questions about the role of inter-satellite links. You mentioned that you will use them. How do you see them in the architecture essential, useful or simply absolutely necessary? Inter-satellite links are an important future innovation that allows, as Patricia has said, the way of selecting gateway locations in areas which may be more favorable in terms of fiber connectivity. Inter-satellite links would also be an important part of providing maritime and aeronautical services for NGSOs where you have long distances over oceans and it's not possible to find a gateway from where you are. So it's certainly something that we're looking at very carefully. Thanks a lot, Julie. I'm sure that there will be further questions during the final Q&A with all the panelists, but for the time being I propose that we move to Mr. Mario Neri from Telesat. So Mario Neri has more than 13 years of experience in the satellite industry and is responsible for securing the appropriate spectrum and orbital resources for the Leo constellation that Telesat is planning to deploy in the near future. In order to do so it takes a role of coordinating the access to these resources with other users including so other satellite operators and notably the four orders that are on this panel. And prior to Telesat Mr. Neri worked for the UK communications regulator OFCOM but also with INMARSAT and UTELSAT to big global satellite operators mainly in the GSO fields. So now Mario I will let you make your presentation and then we will ask you some questions that the audience may wish to address to you. Mario you have the floor. Thank you Alexandre. First of all let me check whether you can see my slides in full screen. I see Yes. I'll say nothing. So before I start let me thank you and the director and all the stuff at the bureau to invite myself as the representative of Telesat to this interesting webinar. We are glad to be here with our non-GSO colleagues and all the other attendees. Let me also express my sincere gratitude to the bureau and to the ITU to have swiftly organized yourself in supporting these initiatives remotely. I'm positively impressed of all the tools that you made available to the membership. So congratulations seriously. So let me spend these minutes that you're kindly giving me to explain to you and the audience what is Telesat Leo. So first of all Telesat you may know he's is a satellite operator that started its business in 1969 and we currently operate 16 just stationary satellites. And a few years ago we started thinking of embarking a new project which consists in deploying a Leo constellation non-GSO constellation that will coexist with our just stationary fleet. So we believe that our constellation will be a key enabler as the title of the slide says for truly global connectivity. And let me explain a few details of Telesat Leo. There are a few technical details. I hope that the audience will like that and also the final part of my presentation will hint at what are in our view the development of their regulatory framework that we believe it's going to be useful for the non-just stationary constellations of the future. So first of all let me explain briefly why Telesat as an established just stationary satellite operator decided to invest a lot of resources in deploying and designing and deploying a non-just stationary constellation. Well basically we believe that there is a market out there that needs to be served because we believe that we have identified the connectivity white space between the terrestrial connectivity solutions that offer high quality services in terms of speed and latency but that they are not available globally. But at the same time we need a satellite solution that is different from the GSO satellite solution because as we know that the gestational satellites are great and we'll continue to be great for certain applications but when you look at a sort of fiber-like connectivity that is available everywhere outside the crowded places where usually the terrestrial fiber solutions are are available you need something new and we believe that the the solution part of the solution is going to be a non-justiational satellite constellation well designed. So let me describe what we have in mind actually what we our constellation will be. So basically we are we are going to launch we will launch and deploy not thousands of satellites but let's say only around 300 satellites and these will be deployed in two different orbital planes one or a sorry orbit sub constellations let's call them a first set of orbital planes will be polar orbits that are designed to cover basically the whole globe especially the poles that in our view because in our viewing the poles there is a market segment needs to be served and addressed and then we will also deploy interleaved with these polar sub constellation and inclined sub constellation that instead will we'll try to address the demand in those areas of the world that are mostly populated we plan to deploy most of our satellites in the inclined sub constellation 220 to be exact and the rest of the satellite 78 will be deployed in the polar constellation if you look at the picture on the right hand side of the slide that provides me an opportunity to describe more technically what our constellation will look like first of all we will be using the cave and spectrum totally so we will be using the cave and spectrum not only for the user links but also for the let's say feeder links gateway links the satellites that we plan to that we will deploy are quite complex they in fact they will have steerable and shapeable spot bins that will radiate the energy where it is needed so we will use the spectrum resources and the power available on board of the satellites only where there is a customer so we will not waste power around let's say or we will not use spectrum not wisely we will have of course on board processing in the sense that all the communication will be processed on board of the satellite and will be routed around as the IP traffic requires and let me stress taking into account the questions that have been asked that we believe that the inter-satellite links are a key feature for a successful constellation and this is why we are we have designed from the beginning the fact that our satellites will be equipped with inter-satellite link laser inter-satellite links that will allow the exchange of high throughput between the satellites and this is mostly for two reasons not only because using inter-satellite links provides a way to reduce number of gateway error stations that you need to have deployed using a similar architecture without inter-satellite links but also because inter-satellite links provide a way to make sure that the satellite network is more resilient and allows for more flexibility so using these inter-satellite links allows to have pre-configured or particular routing options that other designs do not allow and of course all of these will be orchestrated by a network operating system that will manage all the resources of the constellation so from a high-level perspective our constellation will basically be a virtual fiber on the sky so what I mean by that is that we will provide a simple Ethernet layer-to-service our customers will basically have a terminal or a number of terminals that will be connected to these virtual fiber in the sky these virtual Ethernet on the sky and then their traffic will be routed either to the internet or to a private network of the customers or a combination of the two through a telescope point of presence so these we believe that this is necessary because you we know that a lot of customers need this kind of service and this is the kind of communication service that is offered by comparable terrestrial solutions this this light also allows me to highlight which are the customers that we plan to serve the vertical segments that we will be focused on are first of all terrestrial terrestrial providers by offering them backhauling solutions and then we will offer service to government providers and also to aviation and maritime so I will explain later that in our view allowing for mobility in the cave and is a key thing that the ITU could help not just so operators to to succeed in the future so I want also to spend a little bit more time on this blue cloud by expanding what that means in terms of network architecture so basically what we plan to offer to our customers is a on as you can see on the left hand side of the slide a point of entry to our to our network to a user terminal that can very whose characteristics can very based on the service that we want to offer and then this user terminal being managed by our network control center we'll study what is the best routing that the traffic from the user needs to go through in order to reach its target so by using a combination of satellite links optical inter satellite links and a network of landing stations we will make sure that the traffic from the customer will get to the to the intended target using our point of presence and once that the traffic gets to the point of presence which is managed by Thalesat the customer can decide whether to connect directly to that point of presence or just to have that traffic routed to the internet and got getting it back to a similar part backward so let me also explain what are the user terminals that we plan to we plan to offer of course this list is not exhaustive but I want just to give you an idea of the kind of technical solutions that we have in mind as I said part of our customer the customers that we we will serve are in the aeronautical sector so definitely we will our system will support the electronical electronically steered antennas of different dimensions we will have hybrid terminals that plan to employ different technologies from phased array to some more physical steering capabilities or we will also employ mechanical mechanically steering antenna for land applications or even for maritime applications and of course the different terminals will provide different kind of throughputs and different kind of performance to the customers as as it is needed we will be able thanks to our architecture to deliver multiple gigabytes per second of throughput towards a single spot on earth if it's needed in order by just aggregating the capacity coming from different beams of the same of different satellites so definitely this is why I was saying we we designed our constellation in order to make sure that the performance of the service that we are going to offer is comparable to other solutions mainly terrestrial solutions that are available out there what about the service timeline we we will deploy we will start deploying our polar constellation in 2022 and as soon as there are enough resources out there we will start providing services to the portion of the earth that are north or south 55 degrees of north or south latitude and we plan to offer a full global service starting from 2023 when after deploying our satellites in the polar sub constellation we will start deploying the satellites in the inclined sub constellations in order to provide a global service in the way that we intend another important thing is that in January 2018 we launched our first satellite that we called leo one and this satellite has allowed us to carry out a lot of tests with potential customers as I said tell us that is an established satellite operator we have a a large portfolio of customers that have expressed to us their interest and their requirements for non-geostationary connectivity in KA band so what we have done is to try to test with some of them and some other partners the capabilities that non-geostationary connectivity can offer and we carried out a lot of tests this list is non-exhaustive going from land applications to maritime applications to aeronautical applications and what we saw even with a first generation satellite like the one that we deployed in 2018 we saw that the performance that can be offered by a non-geostationary satellite operating in KA band is astonishing we achieved the very low latencies and the throughput that we did not even imagine possible ourselves so this is a proof to say that we believe that this kind of solution and non-geostationary constellation works if well designed and we we try to prove it before finalizing our design and starting deploying our constellation so let me then finish my presentation since we are ITU aficionados on the let's say the top three ITU wishes I would say that in our view a non-geostationary operator may have in the near future I thought of the three main problems that we would like the ITU to help us addressing in order to give us the regulatory certainty that we need to deploy such a complex system like the one that we will deploy the first thing is as you also mentioned previously is the definition of orbital tolerances as you mentioned Alexander WRC-19 adopted resolution 35 on the non-geostome milestones and among beyond doing that also clarified the definition of a notified orbital plane for a non-geostationary satellite especially for a non-geostationary satellite and WRC-19 basically helped us identifying the only four orbital parameters on which the tolerances should be studied and these are the inclination of the orbital plane as you know the altitude of the perigee and apogee and the argument of the perigee so we believe that in the next study cycle I believe that this is there is a high chance that this will become an issue on the agenda item seven to analyze these orbital tolerances and I must say that from an operator's perspective this is extremely important because only by knowing what are the tolerances that we can play with or we can stay with them we will be able to plan our operations in the best possible way so the the second thing is the possibility of defining what is the probability of harmful interference in those scenarios and those interference scenarios where a non-geostome system is involved and why do we believe that this is an important thing as we all know and as you mentioned Alexander non-geostome operators are coordinating actively between ourselves I mean we are we are talking to all the my fellow colleagues that are in this panel but we believe that the the coordination discussions require very context studies that have a lot of unknowns and we believe that what the ITU could do to help us is to define a regulatory scenario that is similar to the one that applies between GSO networks as you know the as you well know Alexander in case of the geostationary networks when there is there needs to be coordination between two geostationary satellites you have a powerful tool at hand which is the examination under 1132A for which the bureau has a methodology to carry out a the assessment for the probability harmful interference unfortunately this tool is not available when a non-geostationary system is involved especially in the KA band not only when two non-geostationary systems need to coordinate between each other but also when a non-geostationary system needs to coordinate with the GSO network and vice versa in certain parts of the KA band so what we believe would be needed is to start the work at the ITU to define a similar scenario a similar framework that would also help us to operate on a non-interference non-protection basis while we are completing coordination since that requires a lot of time to be completed unfortunately we are experiencing ourselves and finally I hope that I'm not over time the third thing that we would like to see is a positive outcome of Agenda Item 1.16 for WRC 23 which means allowing KA band connectivity through non-geostationary systems on mobile platforms this is one of my hobbies at the ITU to deal with ECIMS and I believe that there has been a the ITU in general and the two previous conferences have obtained I have made a great success allowing earth stations in motions to operate with geostationary satellites and I believe that we can use the experience that we accrued in the previous two conferences to make similar decisions or to inform our views on how a regulatory framework could be shaped for non-geostationary ECIMS and let me let me take 30 more seconds in this live because one of the tests that we made we carried out with one of our partners is actually to demonstrate the aeronautical connectivity in KA band using non-geostationary system is actually possible and what we did was an experiment through which an ECIM on an aircraft was able to communicate with our Leo 1 satellite and switch to one of our geostationary satellite having KA band payload to simulate non-geostal handovers and I must say that the performance that these link provided was beyond expectation so we have already the proof that this technology works and can be deployed quickly so these ends my presentation will be happy to answer any question that you have thank you thank you very much Mario and yes we are a little bit beyond schedule so I will ask you one question as Astelisat considered the use of QV band for fiddling and if yes why did you decide finally against it well definitely we have considered it and this is this is one of our plants in the future we did not want to since we we have already invested like more than 100 millions dollars in R&D for our constellation in KA band and what we targeted the KA band because we believe that the technology in KA band is a little bit more mature than the technology in QMV band and in order to find the right balance between a technically sound non-geostationary constellation and a an achievable time to market we believe to concentrate on KA band first but I'd not exclude that we will look at that band in the future thank you very much Mario well I think there will be more questions for you at the end of this panel but for the time being let's move to OneWeb and to Russ Richard Kelly so I'm glad to welcome so Russ has over 25 years of experience in the communication satellite industry she is currently the vice president for regulatory affairs for OneWeb and she ever sees team of the legal technical and policy analysis to work to reform regulatory inspection policies for newer non-GSO satellite constellations such as OneWeb before joining OneWeb Russ was the director of regulatory affairs for O3B now SES Networks she also worked for a law firm now Morgan Stanley and also the American Mobile Satellite Corporation so as you can see she has a wide knowledge of the satellite industry and I will let her introduce the presentation of OneWeb and by the way Russ congratulations for the news that OneWeb has now left chapter 11 situation so I think you are quite believed and this is certainly a good news for the space industry Russ you have the the floor thank you Alexandra yes I think I think the the OneWeb employees are excited possibly even more excited than than the rest of the industry this has been an amazing resurrection of a company not the first by any means to go into and out of bankruptcy in the satellite world it's an expensive world and I'll be happy to talk a little bit more about that Jorge are you going to start the slides for me we can move right into the second slide and I'll give people an update on where we are with the with the bankruptcy process and our new owners appreciating so moving right on to the the first real content slide I'm sure everybody has heard right about the time that the COVID pandemic shut down the world it also shut down financing I'm sure we weren't the only company to be affected but it was so disastrous for us that we had to declare bankruptcy which in the United States is called using Chapter 11 for protection and restructuring a reason to use the United States even though we are a UK company is because of its very mature and sensitive approach to the bankruptcy that the U.S. Code recognizes that it isn't just our company but all of our partners and all of our contracts that are also affected by our bankruptcy and everything gets frozen while the court reviews the situation and what that means is that a partner can't break the contract making our situation even worse right so so much to our great great joy both the UK government and Bharti Global probably one of the largest if not the largest mobile network operator in the world well known I'm sure to all of you came in with nearly a billion dollars worth of funding that new ownership has been approved by the bankruptcy court and now we're just waiting for some final approvals to sort of cross the T's and dot the I's and we expect to be fully out of that sort of legal protection by December, January at the latest it has not stopped our behavior as a growing satellite enterprise by the way we have continued to build the satellites with our joint venture OneWebSatellites we continue to apply for and receive licenses around the world continue to have discussions with other investors by the way and we expect to start our restart our regular launches fingers crossed in December of this year right so we've worked through the contracts with the launch vehicle and the manufacturers and everything is coming along very nicely so those will start again again it's roughly 36 satellites launched at a time by Ariane on a Soyuz and the next launch should be out of the Russian site Vostoshny it is interesting super interesting I think to everybody on this call I hope that the pandemic not only was a direct source of OneWebS problems but it has also proved our business case right the fact that people need connectivity wherever we are the chat when people checked in to say where they were it's every ITU region in the world the entire globe is connected wirelessly right with remote locations and so the need for this kind of connectivity is is is absolutely proven so those people who are like how many people are going to need this right it's really the population centers that need connectivity that's not true anymore people are fleeing high density population areas if they can they're going to islands they're going to remote locations right we have understood that there is a need to be distanced and furthermore there isn't a need to be all in the same city we can do great work with with remote connectivity so this is an exciting time for the ITU and the and the Leo and non-geostationary operators in the world obviously we think that Leo is better than me or Geo and that's why our company is at Leo I don't think I need to explain the value of of lower latency to anybody on this call and I'll also talk a little bit more about our attitude toward responsible space I've seen in the questions many questions about both orbital debris and the and the optical astronomy situation so I'll address that a little later if we can move on to the next slide so here just to remind people most people today are communicating via the internet I imagine most of us are connected to this via the internet very few of us will be using a geostationary satellite connection although we could be geostationary is obviously the absolute best technology for point to multi-point you know broadcasting of information is a little less good for two-way communication right people people know you don't like to have a voice call and you time out on the internet if you're actually trying to do many of today's applications so this is increased the demand for non-geostationary right it's not a coincidence that the non-geos are finding a market and finding a demand when they didn't 20 years ago right when the internet was brand new and when mobile phones were in 1G let alone 2G right that world has changed dramatically in the last 10 years if not 15 right and now everybody wants and needs a 4G connection a 4G connection to their personal mobile device and so these non-geos are going to be part of that delivery service part of the infrastructure in the backbone that's being used to get all of those applications at the bottom to you and your phone wherever you are next slide please and it also goes I think without saying and yet here I will have a whole slide on it that you can't lay a fiber to somebody in the air or the middle of the ocean so getting these applications and these services and this connectivity to people everywhere means being able to use a technology that can reach airplanes and ships as well as individuals no matter where they are right now OneWeb's first generation is looking at about 600 satellites in a low earth orbit at 1200 kilometers there is nobody else at that particular altitude it is one of the reasons we chose it to avoid other constellations there are a small satellite compared to traditional satellite there are about 150 kilos about the size of a washing machine and we are in polar orbits and right now we're spacing those at about 12 planes around the world with roughly 50 satellites per plane great look angle for satellites I mean for airplanes especially those traveling say from the population centers in Europe to those in North America you're sort of directly underneath the satellite at all time it's just going to change the user experience considerably next slide please oh I think this is going to be our video so thank you Since the beginning the World Wide Web has never been worldwide but in 2021 a new and truly global 5G ready network will fix that say you're working on the edge of the world and need to do a video call perhaps your mid ocean or mid air wherever you are you'll have a signal one web will connect your device to a customized terminal that can be as small as a briefcase and just as compact whatever your location the terminal encrypts your data and sends it at high speed to our satellite fleet passing overhead these spacecraft are radically innovated built in our own factory at 150th the traditional time and cost shrunk to the size of a washing machine yet engineered to deliver powerful throughput month by month we're growing our satellite fleet and by 2021 we'll have not only the global spectrum rights but the network reach to deliver truly worldwide coverage and here's the revolutionary part the fleet will be in low earth orbit 30 times closer to earth than geostationary satellites this gives you a stable real-time connection with no interruption or annoying lag what's more our fleet always keeps moving orbiting in a constellation design that creates seamless coverage each satellite uses a set of beams to cover an area the size of alaska terrain is no obstacle from its flight path and pattern our fleet can always find your signal so we can get you online from even the trickiest locations with look angles that geosatellite board band simply can't deliver we maintain high grade system resilience from two ops centers using state-of-the-art ops concepts cloud architecture gives us powerful scalability and control remotely for example we can remove satellites at the end of their service life so that the only trace we'll leave in space is on your screen right now now back to that video call of yours we beam your data back down to earth to our nearest satellite network portal then via one of our points of presence gateways positioned in secure locations trusted by global providers it reenters the web the journey you've just watched takes at most one tenth of a second and there they are your video call is good to start whether with colleagues or your family back home so from 2021 you need never be out of signal or out of mind one web will connect you from unconnectable locations and keep you productive on the move this will be a breakthrough year when one web technology creates real human progress connecting everywhere for everyone great just move on to the next slide please so one of the questions I saw was about how expensive people tend to think of satellites which I think is a little unfair but in any event today's smaller satellites are going to be vastly less costly to produce and that will be passed on to the customers for sure for example I know Patricia already mentioned how SpaceX is manufacturing nearly a hundred satellites was it a month so one web also has an assembly line that it has really revolutionized with the help of our partner Airbus and we have a facility in Florida and each one of the assembly lines can make a satellite a day when you think that the traditional satellites used to take 18 to 24 months to build and they cost two to three hundred million dollars this is revolutionary right these satellites cost a roughly one million dollars to make and that's going to go down in time as you know so the assembly line and the idea of quickly easily swapping out different payloads on the existing buses upgrading various parts of the bus this is a real revolution it's happening in the launch vehicle market as well right where the launch vehicles themselves are adapting to launch multiples of smaller satellites as opposed to one or at most two very very large satellites so these changes are going to reduce the price and make things happen more quickly and allow upgrading of new iterations of these constellations next slide please by the way if you haven't seen it the National Geographic has an just a delightful short documentary called Made in a Day it's a series and one of those is about the one-web satellite factory in Florida making satellites in a day so the fixed markets is going to be the first ones to use these non-geostationary satellites right these are the ones that have established cell phone and mobile phone customers they need to have reliable backhaul to remote locations and that's what these non-geostationaries are going to do by putting a terminal anywhere you connect via wifi to a mile or two away from that terminal you can have it on your own building you can have it on a pole in the middle of nowhere you can put it on a plane on a ship and the terminal market is what is going through incredible r&d right now this is the location if you have extra money you should be looking into innovating in the terminals to receive these low earth orbit signals I think the holy grail which is space-based directly to handheld we're not there yet but I have great faith in the engineers of the world I know what they've done in the past with technology and I hope that they will will get there but in the meantime as long as you can put a slightly larger briefcase or pizza box terminal near near you you can then have a wi-fi connection and bring up an entire building or entire community the man packs are being developed as well I know for all of us so this is coming but in the short term in the 2021-2022 time frame we're probably looking at larger more traditional earth stations of course the non-geostationary need at least two trackable traditional parabolic antennas but again by 2022-23 the electronically steered the flat panels these are going to be in wider production and they're going to be snapped up next slide please you know this is the issue between the different technologies the different satellite technologies right is what technology is going to give the end user the best experience and it's not just going to be a question of geo versus leo but there's also fiber and there's also terrestrial 3, 4 and eventually 5G and we all know that the user does not care what technology is used as long as it works and if it's that last meter if it's the wi-fi that fails look how angry we are or how quick we are to blame the kid next door for streaming a stupid video when you're trying to do work and you think you're sharing the bandwidth with your neighbors so multiple technologies are involved and we as a larger industry and we within the ITU community have got to be aware that it's an ecosystem that there's a network of networks that is needed to bring first everyone to 4G right we all know that there are a vast number of people with 2G or nothing so let's bring everyone to 4G and then as 5G comes on board obviously satellite has to be part of that space-based it may not be satellite it may be drones it may be haps right but a space-based technology will have to be part of it and we have to recognize that the regulators got to keep the options open for the best technology for different pockets of population within their country next slide please I think I've talked about all of this we're fast we're global so we will do pole-to-pole and the entire world we hope it'll be simple we're really hoping to especially in times of disaster to be able to drop a box with a terminal and with mobile phones in it maybe even a bicycle for power if there's no solar we're really thinking about the quick and easy way for someone to be up and operational and not just first responders the whole community needs to get back online as soon as possible when there's been a disruption so we're focused on that as well next slide please all right so the final slide I talk about responsible space so again I mentioned that we chose an orbit where there wasn't someone that's one way to be responsible not have your altitudes overlapping we actually have already put a magnetic grappling structure on the outside of our satellites although the debris removal industry is not yet mature it's coming along right their companies like AstroScale and others in the world who are devising affordable ways to go into space and retrieve debris retrieve remove the existing garbage so we're ready for when that comes along we are testing on the ground so that we don't purposely launch garbage that we are not purposely launching something that we're not sure if it works we've launched 74 satellites and we have 100% operational I want to say that again 100% of our 74 satellites are operational now I hope not to bring down bad karma on me but one of the reasons is our philosophy is to get it right on the ground before we launch it space is a long way away and it's hard to clean up after ourselves it's big I know it's big but the world's attitude toward the environment has changed not only on the ground but in space and we have to be responsible in our approach to it and as for the optical astronomy community we too have been talking to them for years and although we were not active in the previous six months we weren't active with anybody really in the previous six months as we were sort of quieted by our bankruptcy situation but it's you know during the pandemic somebody said even my mother-in-law bought a telescope to look at the skies so people are are more aware than ever of how beautiful the stars are and while they get excited when they hear that they can see the International Space Station with their naked eye and here's the app you can download they get excited when they understand that they can see a starlink a whole string of link of starlink satellites going across the sky they're also troubled they also think uh-oh this is going to forever change the view so uh none of the geo excuse me none of the Leo's want that right so we're working closely with the community to understand the the the issues they've got with brightness and how we can avoid interfering with their observations not only with the naked eye but deep space this is a concern to everybody it's a good conversation as patrice has said there's a another session this week on dark and quiet skies this is something that is is needed for for the astronomy community and at the same time that community understands that they too want to be connected they've got massive data needs they're often remote so they want what we are bringing to the world so this is definitely a conversation a discussion about what can be done not only with our satellites but with their software and with their telescopes and what can we help fund as far as developments and improvements in the technologies that they are using so as to make sure that we're all coming to the best possible conclusion I think that is the end of my presentation Jorge the last slide just has my my email I can't believe I'm giving this out to people thank you very much you may discover the the consequence in the next hours but thank you very much for this very detailed and interesting presentation I think many people were eager to to better understand the situation of OneWeb and how you are doing I have one question on the Q&A we have seen in the press many things about OneWeb and one of the announcement was that in the future for future satellites there may be also hosted payload in addition to the communication payload on the OneWeb satellite is it something that you are considering or is it completely fake news it's not fake news at all obviously a satellite operator we're building to make money and so what our customers want is what we want to deliver so the first generation those 600 satellites those are designed but we're already building Gen 2 or designing Gen 2 even Gen 3 and Gen 4 right one of the reasons we look to additional spectrum such as Q&V band is an awareness that in 10 or 15 years we're going to need those bands for our for our gateway connections or what have you so if our main investors who are themselves have needs both Her Majesty's government and Barty have ideas about what our satellites should be serving and so Gen 2 will look to be able to do that I know that several of the other presenters talked about inter-satellite links that's an obvious solution to improve latency to be more efficient but it's not quite there yet so it's not on our Gen 1 satellites but we're launching as quickly as we can to offer this first service Barty is super interested in just having a couple of big parabolic antennas in the middle of a field to to to blank at those parts of Africa and India that have nothing they're like look they've got plenty of room they don't need the sexy flat panel we can stick a couple of parabolics in this village in this town in this remote location so the first generation is going to be able to serve one of the biggest desires of our new owners and the second generation if it can host a payload that would be useful to the UK government then we will do that Thanks a lot let's now move to the last panelist and so she's Susan Malloy working for SES and in particular on the non-GSO constellations of SES, OSUBI the so Susan is a VP for legal and regulatory affairs for SES I'm particularly pleased that she is able to join us because SES as you know is also not only operating non-GSO constellations but they are also operating many GSO satellites so they are a little bit the in the middle of both worlds so I'm sure that she will be able to provide us with some insights about these aspects so Susan has focused on the regulatory strategy for non-GSO satellite market access within SES and previously she was working as Vice President for Dubai Satellite Service Operator, DBSB and also also acted as a Senior Regulatory Council for Teledesik so I will let Miss Malloy make a presentation and then we will discuss all together some questions that are in my view relevant for all of you Susan you have the floor Hi Alexander thanks to Mario to you and to Jorge for organizing this panel and for being so kind as to invite SES and Jorge I will need your kind assistance to put on my presentation today Thank you very much so the next slide please as Alex as you mentioned SES has a long history in the satellite industry as a pioneer and an innovator our we started as a geostationary satellite company and video distribution has been a major part of our business and remains so to this day we reach more than 350 million households worldwide with video and with data connectivity on our geostationary fleet I'll get into the details of the fleet later but at this point we've evolved quite a bit through innovation through being an industry leader in providing satellite services so at this point we consider ourselves a global managed data services provider our job is to connect people by a variety of means cloud applications are a very important growing part of our business of which this the seminar is a huge example of the kinds of applications that are moving to the cloud and that are supporting our ability to do business today and to just connect with each other telcos, mobile network operators are a big part of our business internet service providers, enterprises, governments mobility is a very large part of our business and I think you heard that reflected as well among the other panelists how important mobility will be in the future to reach all of our customers wherever they may be next slide please I'm perfectly well coffee is frightening in the age of COVID but I'm doing quite well even though I went on mute to do that let's see so geostationary satellites are our main as I said that's how we started out in the business we have an over 50 satellite fleet what that particular architecture allows is for us to cover large areas whether or not they are densely populated geostationary our geostationary satellites deliver a wide variety of applications I mentioned video distribution which is content multicasting but also enterprise connectivity is a very important part of what our wide beam satellites do and you can see there that we use a wide range of frequencies to deliver that CKU and KA band spectrum our high throughput satellites of which we have three and another one planned are reducing the cost per megabits of delivery of service and enhance our ability to provide connectivity for video and data transmissions those services are being offered in the KU and KA band QV band is becoming an important element of supporting high throughput satellite services as you've heard mentioned by the panelists our non geostationary satellite system and which is a medium earth orbit high throughput system is O3B we've had 20 satellites in operation we were the first in commercially operational broadband satellite system and we're happy to have company soon we are planning an additional 11 satellites this should be updated to reflect that our in power constellation will be 11 satellites our satellites under our current operational constellation deliver up to 2 gigabits per second per beam with less than 150 milliseconds latency and these satellites are using KA exclusively today and the QV band is as was also mentioned by Mario that's an important part of how we have to plan our future constellations and we have our eye on that for enhancing our ability to use KA in the future next slide please so our with our current neoconstellation of 20 satellites this constellation has been in operation since 2015 and we've been able to allow our customers to very quickly transition to 3G 4G services LTE and we fully expect and have done much testing both with our MEO fleet and our geostationary fleet to be able to support 5G applications and be a very integral part of 5G solutions the innovation for with the MEO fleet has been that we are able to deliver fiber equivalent services so this is an enormous amount of capacity this is typically for enterprise service these services are carrier grade which means that that the what you see on the screen in terms of a certification has meant that we are certified using the same standards as terrestrial network to be able to provide fiber like services so that means that we are able to serve a variety of geographies and a variety of needs and applications so we are serving urban as well as rural areas as you'll see in a couple of examples that I'll present and we are definitely supporting governments to fulfill their role in involving their citizens in civil society with broadband networks next slide please so an example of our providing the ability of our own system and of satellites generally to be able to provide various central services to urban areas is the work that we've done with mobile network operators to bring to do 4G backhaul and to support 4G services in a variety of locations in this instance what you're seeing on the screen is illustrating the service that we provide in Iquitos Peru in partnership with an internet service provider Accessat we provide satellite-based backhaul this is a fairly remote area of Peru I think you can see from part of the backdrop that this is very close to areas that are rainforest and hard to reach not well connected or perhaps when we got there connected by fiber so that the services that can be offered are limited and lesser until you can get fiber-like capacity and that's what we've been able to deliver you can also see that this is serving a significant urban area this is Peru's sixth largest city with 500,000 people but the services that they get are equivalent to what can be available in Lima we're talking about 4G and LTE services and up to one gigabits per second per bee this is a low latency service less than 150 millisecond again able to deliver the quality of service that is expected when you're connected to a fiber network as I also mentioned this kind of capability is allowing cloud applications today whether it's virtual meetings the level of security that is needed to support the applications that we are now no longer having on premises but accessing through software and connectivity in the cloud and internet of things powering our rapid transition to networks that can support the distribution and use of big data over large areas next slide please one thing we're happy about and I know that my colleagues would probably have a number of examples to share as well is our ability as a satellite provider to be able to very rapidly deploy additional resources when they're required for example this current situation so our COVID response has involved also serving an area that's really not far from the area that you just saw featured in Iquitos and the area that we were able to expand service to rapidly in the Amazon basin using Leticia, Colombia it's actually a city that borders on Brazil as well as Peru this is again an example of serving not the rural area but serving a city to be able to amplify their capacity to provide service to citizens whether it's through FreeWise by hotspots as we as was delivered in Leticia or to enable expanded services to hospitals this connectivity was also able to be made available to households and businesses and to help establish e-learning or expand e-learning platforms for local students again previous panelists have emphasized how very important it is and how and how COVID sort of illustrated that the connectivity that is available sitting on top of fiber in an urban area is really needed by everyone now to be able to access platforms like the one that we're on or simply to do everyday business or very basic activities of government like school like hospitals this is not just a nice to have anymore our public internet has to be available wherever citizens are whether it's in remote areas which we can serve or urban areas which as you've seen in these past two examples we do serve so we do need this connectivity now and the exciting part of this panel is seeing how very many ways we'll be able to get this connectivity to populated areas around the world and to areas wherever we may be I'll talk in a bit when we get to the ITU section about e-sins or stations in motion which is very much about making sure that the kind of connectivity that we're relying on for the COVID response and for our everyday activities is available wherever people go not where we live whether it's a remote area or city but wherever we go so that's on airplanes which eventually will all be able to like it or not travel extensively as we have been doing by plane by ship or to conduct and go to places remotely we will want the same kind of connectivity that we were able to access now on this platform and in cities next slide please so we are expanding what we're able to do we're very excited about the beginning of the launch next year of our new MEO constellation in power which will very significantly enhance the capabilities of our already operational MEO system what we have in our current system is reach but based on steerable spot beams so these spot beams are very capable on our current constellation they've been able to follow ships they are very easily repositioned to meet needs or to transition needs to new areas one of the things that has happened with our existing system is that in many areas we've been able to make the case for fiber basically to show that even if it does not look like a densely populated area the communications needs for high throughput capacity for fiber like capacity are there and once fiber once our system has been able to serve an area the justification for fiber the business case for fiber can be made more evident what is happening now with Empower is that rather than just be able to make that case or to show or to meet the needs for high throughput capacity fiber like capacity in remote areas in urban areas where that need is not being met with the Empower constellation we'll have steerable and shapeable beams that are very rapidly programmable so that that reach and that carrier grade throughput can be rapidly deployed and repositioned and amplified or turned down as needed really on a virtual real-time basis as with the current system this will be a very high performance low latency system the networks owing to the ability of the beams to be steered and shaped and to dynamically adjust power will be very dynamic and adaptive networks and this will operate seamlessly in a cloud enabled architecture we will have a redeveloping new tools new software to and to maximize our ability to switch between applications to to switch between customers or to very rapidly adjust to customers changing needs all this is scalable one of the benefits of of MEO is how easily how seamlessly scalable the constellation has been we started out with a 12 satellite constellation which we rapidly decided we need to expand with our existing MEO constellation from 12 to the current 20 satellites our originally planned seven satellites for beginning the empower constellation has rapidly worked into an 11 satellite constellation that we intend to deploy and this ability to scale allows us to meet needs as they grow and we've only seen that growth so we're optimistic as are the other panelists about the future of the empower constellation next slide please so this again shows kind of the progression of what we're going to see in terms of bandwidth improvement there's a link to video of how each of these networks work as you can see on the left we are now working with steerable beams but on the right the graphic that you see shows that what kind of connectivity we'll be able to achieve we have the beams that are electronically steerable and shapeable what this will mean for the delivery of service we'll have many more user endpoints that we can reach we can improve our link budgets we'll have much more connectivity increased flexibility we will be able to deliver our services at a lower cost per bit and scale up at this point we haven't had the capacity necessarily to serve the customers the way we would at the scale we would like and we will be scaling up quite significantly with the capabilities it will have with the empower constellation next slide please with respect to WRC 19 just looking backwards about what we were what we've been able to achieve it has been very important for our medium-resorbent system that we've focused on earth stations in motion we've got a regime in place for geostationary satellites now as a result of WRC 19 spanning the full bands that are in use typically by any typical geostationary satellite system in the KA band and so that's very timely with the recent rapid growth of deployed aeronautical capacity and maritime capacity for empower what we're very gratified to see is that we will be studying this in in this cycle for NGSO ECIMS there's a very strong basis for a global harmonized framework now for supporting the kind of connectivity that we're talking about high throughput low latency on aeronautical platforms and on maritime platforms or wherever we are serving mobile platforms one of the things that we've been able to show as well is that we can effectively I saw a question in the chat about being able to provide the mechanics of providing high throughput connectivity to rapidly moving aeronautical platforms last year already a year ago working with Hughes and Tullis and Thinkom which produces a flat panel antenna for aeronautical uses we were able to demonstrate speeds over 250 megabit per second to that aeronautical platform via on a using the medium Earth orbit using the O3B constellation but also being able to switch from that constellation to geostationary capacity so the ability to do that is here the the ability to close this out a global harmonized regulatory framework for ESIMs on non-geostationary satellites in the coming cycle couldn't be more important also important and this is something that Mario mentioned specifically is the use of the QB bands we're now all going to be intensively using Ka-band and we are talking about very high throughput capacity in an era where we're only thinking of ways to use our spectrum and capacity more efficiently based on growing demand so we all in a satellite industry very much have our eye on the ways that QB band can help us manage this intense growth in capacity in the use of capacity we're expecting to see we were for the same reason we were very happy to see that additional spectrum is being allocated to the fixed satellite service and also that now that we are all actively deploying additional new constellations that there's a very clear framework for commercial systems in terms of bringing into use of our systems and milestones or rolling them out next slide please so I've mentioned how important ESIMs are and that and how important it is that's being studied in this cycle for non-geostationary satellite systems again this is something now that we have great commercial experience with already in the market we have a very solid framework based on the geostationary studies and understanding of moving forward and so this is a very important course of study over the next over this study cycle SCS is also very interested in the developments that will be taking place in studying satellite satellite links what we see in terms of the importance of these links is there have been a lot of questions about interest satellite links being used by constellations but our interest in this has been linked to the future of internet of things the future of small satellites for example what we're seeing is that as there is a variety of constellations and also a variety of applications that is all about aggregating data whether it is small satellites doing imaging to be able to accurately and in real time track agricultural track farms to see how crops are growing that kind of agricultural application or internet of things the way that networks are being architected is we'll have all these devices aggregating all this data and they'll need to go to a central point or they can be gathered this data can be gathered gathered on the edge of the network to aggregate data that can be useful locally in managing local environments using the data that is gathered from devices connected to the internet of things all this means that that data needs to be aggregated around the world and rapidly distributed back to where the business that is using it is is deploying that information or aggregated for analysis anywhere around the world but that not all of the systems that are gathering this data necessarily have the kind of global infrastructure or you don't want to rely solely on a fiber infrastructure to get this data to where it needs to be so these satellite satellite links are going to be a really important element in being able to get data making sure there's a very clear regulatory framework for operations that are already being conceived of and they're in and significant efforts to sort of commercially implement the use of satellites to backhaul all kinds of data again whether it's internet of things whether it is images we really are seeing a very strong need for this so you'll see SES active and engaged on this particular agenda item next slide please so finally for us the NGSO constellations are a really important element of accelerating deployment of 4G and 5G SES has a company that is heavily invested and is really exploiting to the full extent the ability of a multi orbit constellation to adapt a particular application to a particular need or the right application to the right need we see this development of NGSO constellations as making a very much stronger seamless data network our legacy data networks are going to have to rapidly upgrade deploy expand as we've seen based on the needs that are communications needs connectivity needs that we've seen growing or just blade bear by the pandemic so our ability to serve hard to serve areas and underserved areas again whether it's urban or remote has never been so clear and SES again with a multi orbit constellation and the ability to provide this connectivity at a multiplicity of levels is really excited about where this part of the industry is going the panelists have all made very clear how very large and significant the investments are in this new sector this is not just for the space side this is for the ground segment as well and for our part we are we continue to innovate and this panel is just another example how that innovation has been brought to bear to bring a whole new dimension to the satellite sector that is included for SES being one of the first two really really invest in our partner in launching SpaceX and it's evident by what many of the panelists have been outlining in terms of the use of steerable and shapeable beams in terms of their use of ESIMs so we're looking forward to more of that in the future and what we all need for this and I'm sure we'll get to this is we will need reliable access to spectrum one of the things that has been talked about in terms of spectrum sharing is the ability of particularly gateway facilities to share spectrum particularly in the multi-service environment that we're in but I think it's important to emphasize that these are going to be ubiquitous services and so there are going to be places where we will need access to spectrum that's dedicated exclusively to satellite we are sharing very intensively among ourselves at the moment in the geostationary environment and we as an operational system are engaged with all the folks on the panel in how in the future we're going to be sharing in this multi-in GSO environment we're very excited about it and we we shouldn't fail to mention that the ITU is playing a very important role in that that process is is very is tried and true with there has been a lot of give and take between us and the other operators in this and I'm sure that's going on between the operator on this panel we're sharing the same frequencies we're sharing multiple orbits even in the non-geostationary environment and the ITU process for us is still the very best way to manage this process globally so again thanks to you to the ITU for inviting us and thanks to the other panelists for sharing so much about your systems today thank you very much Suzanne and this is a very nice conclusion that I completely share I notice that we are quite advanced in the schedule maybe what I would suggest is that we conclude by answering one question that was in fact that could be relevant for each of the systems and this is as in your experience either operating a satellite system or a non-GSO system or planning to operate one what is the most important policy step that a regulator can take to ensure that your system can deploy its services quickly to the citizens of the regulator's country so what would be the most important policy decision they can take I will go in the reverse order maybe I will start with Suzanne and go up to Patricia thanks Alexander one of the things we've been talking about on this panel since we're talking about WRC is harmonization of regulatory frameworks and policies across regions this has really helped so the ITU's role in frequency harmonization and developing regulatory frameworks has helped us not every country has resources to be able to manage very easily the processing of our requests for licensing when it's a brand new service whether it's brand new bands or just an unfamiliar technology so the ITU's role in being able to develop policies like ESEM in the area of ESEMs or stations and motions in motion and other areas has been really important what markets themselves can do that really helps us to roll out quickly once we're able to get our satellites launched and in operation is it we've found the most ease of access when markets have fully articulated policies and processes for VSAT licensing that's I think where we've seen the fastest market access and roll out we were also able to over the years we've seen that we are most easily able to deploy where there is dedicated spectrum for big satellite use big satellite service use and where the regulator is prepared for VSAT licensing whether it's blanket licensing whether it is ESEMs or just generally ubiquitous big satellite service deployment we're a technology that is able to reach the full territory of nations and the ability to deploy multiple user terminals is really important so where governments have had those frameworks in place we've had ease of access it's also important that governments are prepared especially with non-GEO stationary constellations that will have more in user equipment associated directly with those networks to be able to have policies that allow for very clear certification of equipment or what qualifies as certified and very clear ability to import equipment that can slow the speed delivery of service thanks Alex thanks a lot Susan so going to Ruth for one web what would be the most important policy steps that the regulator can take to ease the deployment of these new non-GSO systems yeah thanks first I want to echo and agree with Suzanne a hundred percent global harmonization is a prerequisite because these technologies this technology is global maybe for the first time ever I think that satellites in general have made regulators around the world struggle with what they perceive as perhaps a bit of loss of control right so one satellite covers not only their country but neighboring countries and a wider region and how do you control and make sure that your communications are secure whatever concerns you have about that while allowing access to your markets right these satellites so now we have constellations that are licensed via one nation at the ITU and the other 199 nations want to be sure that their communications are secure and safe and so I applaud the ITU I'm grateful to the ITU all of these systems have pointed out that they're using the K-A band the 28 gigahertz band I'm grateful to the ITU for recognizing that this is where these new satellites are going and so those countries that are not harmonizing that are going their own way that's a big difficulty that is a big difficulty for a global technology and the recognition by these countries that their regulations may have been written 20 years ago 30 years ago under a regime of what I would now call traditional geostationary satellites one satellite one antenna that was the whole system and the recognition that we are now talking hundreds if not thousands of satellites and tens if not hundreds of earth stations which may have more than one antenna and it might not be in your country but that doesn't mean you can't have control that you can't feel secure about the communications with your consumers with your users and so that flexibility to recognize that the regulations might need to be reworded is important to enable these new technologies thank you very much and now we're going to Mario Mario you told us your wish list for ITU but what would be your preferred wish in terms of national regulators what should they what should they do in priority in your view for allowing TELESA to deploy quicker sure I will try not to repeat what Susanna Ruth have said that I fully share and probably in my previous life like others in this panel I worked for a national regulator in my view for a satellite for a global satellite company it's important to have national licenses around to be able to work so in my view what is important for a national regulator is trying to cut the red tape in order to get the national license which doesn't necessarily mean to have a regulatory regime that favors satellite and does not favor other services light touch regulatory regime can also be used for protecting other services that are sharing the same bands and that would be definitely the top one of the top things I will put in my wish list for national policies thank you thank you very much Julie what would be your your advice for national regulators what should they do first thank you Alexander I too feel that harmonization of spectrum regulatory frameworks for non-GSOs is vitally important and I will say that that includes both fixed and mobility applications which seem to be more of a challenge for regulators than fixed applications and as far as the ITU is concerned creating an enabling mindset where we approach the introduction of new technologies and the evolution of innovation such that we're focused on allowing them to enter the marketplace and to enter the community of solutions for providing broadband to people who need it is so important that we use real parameters we use rational protection criteria and we get to a yes answer thanks thank you very much and finally Patricia now that you have more than 700 satellites in orbit I'm sure you have some idea about what is in your view the main priority that regulators should consider to facilitate the deployment of non-GSO systems so they've gotten great wise advice from my colleagues and friends on the panel I think the one thing I would say to a national regulator is be clear on what you're hoping to accomplish if you're trying to increase broadband then start from the bottom with the consumer and the end user what do you want them to do make sure that you've got a way for that device whether whatever it's called by whatever provider it is to clearly be certified try and look at regional certifications and standardization to try and make that faster look to make sure you've got a way to authorize multiple terminals because you're hoping to connect lots of different sites so blanket licensing is a great tool that's been approached by lots of regulators and then I would look at the frequency bands that you would use at a consumer for us it's KU band I think for one web 2 the others would be KA band understand who the other users are and what parameters we need to observe to be to use those frequencies that are allocated to us and the adjacent services for the gateways I think those are those are almost always individually licensed site by site and there are lots of little tricks and steps I'd second Mario's comment about looking at the red tape how do you get from selecting a site getting an authorized those are all things that take time everyone on this panel is working hard to bring kind of the space capability to reaching broadband service provision and we're glad to have real customers using us right now and hoping to grow that but each step in that regulatory process can add time to when a customer can actually make use of it and if anything right now I think all of us are inventive companies we're all driving hard towards this but as Julie mentioned I think the pandemic is underscoring the urgency for us to move fast so for national regulators do an inventory from what you want the sort of objective you've set from the customer side all the way up that's what I would recommend and I think regulators are doing that we're hearing from around the world that these times are prompting streamlining so that's terrific thank you thank you very much I think that's a nice conclusion that we should we should really focus on the consumer needs and our our fellow citizens needs to get access to the internet this is certainly one of the most important objective that you have set to provide connectivity to the world I just would like to end this nice webinar we're showing you the result of the polls that we have been doing during the webinar we ask three questions in your view how dominant will non-JSO large constellation issue will be during the next study cycle and next WRC 23 most of you answered as prominent as during WS 19 so what is the main challenge for satellite operators planning to deploy non-JSO system most of you answered the coordination among non-JSO systems just before funding and finally do you think that non-JSO constellations are not providing broadband connectivity and those targeting the IoT market could share the same spectrum and the the main answer the majority answered why not but under certain conditions aiming at addressing the network at the root genetic we have received in the Q&A a lot of questions about IoT systems this was not really the focus of this webinar but the number of questions has made us aware of the interest of the topic as well and so we may plan a further IoT satellite webinars in 2021 addressing specifically the topic of IoT but by concluding I would like to thank the five panelists I think you provided us a very good overview of the current situation for non-JSO satellite broadband systems and I was very glad to hear the values views and your values approach to the market so I would like to thank you on behalf of the ITU I'm sure that we will meet with many participants that were online and I would like to conclude by remembering people that we will host a third episode of the ITU satellite webinars on 11th of November take care it will be one hour earlier than usual and this will be dedicated to JSO satellites so that to have a complete picture of the space ecosystem so I would like to thank you again and I wish you a good day a good night a good end of the day and stay safe and see you hopefully sometimes somewhere in night view meetings probably not this year but maybe next year see you and bye-bye