SpaceQ Space news and analysis.
Telesat announced today that it had signed a 10+ year agreement with networking and laser communications technology company Aalyria to use its Spacetime product for the Lightspeed Constellation.
Aalyria describes its Spacetime product as a next-generation networking technology that has “greater than 2 million hours of lights-out orchestration of aerospace nodes. Designed to operate networks that include dynamic physical link topologies and highly-directional steerable beams across land, sea, air, and space.”
Telesat will use Spacetime “to organize the efficient flow of customer traffic over the Telesat Lightspeed Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation.”
Aalyria says that “Spacetime blends traditional SDN / SD-WAN features for the enterprise network and ground segment with control plane orchestration of wireless networks and directional or steerable beams. This novel approach, called Temporospatial Software-Defined Networking (TS-SDN), augments the network information base with a digital twin capable of modeling the position, orientation, and motion of any physical platforms and forecasting the opportunities for wireless links and coverage opportunities over time. Leveraging predictability in motion, weather, and faster-than-realtime modeling allows Spacetime to jointly optimize and solve the steerable beam tasking and scheduling, radio and optical transceiver resource management, and path-agnostic route orchestration across time and space, in all domains.”
Aalyria was created in March of 2022 and acquired the TS-SDN technology from Google who began work in it 2013.
In the news release Telesat said it “will use Aalyria’s Spacetime platform to find the most robust and reliable routing of customer data between any two points on earth through real-time analysis of millions of possible paths, autonomously evolving antenna link scheduling, dynamic network traffic routing, and spectrum resources based on changing network requirements. Spacetime leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to create a digital twin of the Earth and space, enabling it to overcome the effects of movement, atmosphere, and weather on connectivity. This first-of-its-kind approach will enable Telesat to flexibly connect its satellites orbiting in space with networks across the world in a way that was previously not possible.”
Commenting on the announcement Dave Wendling, Telesat’s Chief Technical Officer, said “Aalyria’s Spacetime orchestration capabilities are a key enabler in achieving the lowest latency, highest availability and resiliency for meeting the committed information rates and service level agreements for our enterprise-class LEO services. Aalyria’s expertise and heritage with Spacetime align perfectly with our vision for Telesat Lightspeed, and we are confident that this partnership will contribute to the success of this revolutionary network.”
Chris Taylor, CEO of Aalyria, added, “We are excited to partner with Telesat in the development of Telesat Lightspeed, a constellation that is set to redefine the possibilities of global satellite communication. Aalyria’s Spacetime will play a pivotal role in ensuring the efficient orchestration and management of the network, and we look forward to contributing to Telesat’s success.”
Spacetime customers include Intelsat, Rivada, Defense Information Systems Agency, U.S. Space Force among others.
