The Edge Supplement
Telcos, satellites, and compute
American Tower’s Edge data center journey
> How are tower companies embracing Edge deployments?
The low-power AI Edge
> SiMa hopes to compete with Nvidia by undercutting it on power
Giving Private 5G networks a sporting chance
> Orange showcases its latest 5G/ Edge use cases in Marseille
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Contents
4. Inside American Tower's Edge data center journey
How are tower companies embracing Edge deployments?
8. Advertorial: Leading the way in AIpowered Edge computing
10. Telesat's take on the Edge
The satellite company details how it's using LEO satellites to support Edge capabilities
14. Giving Private 5G networks a sporting chance Orange showcases its latest 5G/Edge use cases in Marseille
17. The low-power AI Edge
SiMa hopes to compete with Nvidia by undercutting it on power
Edge meets IoT, AI, and DCs
In the age of AI, it's time for another conversation around Edge and how it continues to drive use cases and revenue opportunities. There's been plenty of discussion around whether Edge has arrived, and if it's worth all the hype.
A US tower giant, satellite provider, one of the world's biggest carriers, and even an AI-focused chipset developer outline the latest in Edge advancements as they put their faith in building out the Edge. Edge data centers at the tower American Tower is one of the biggest telco infrastructure providers in the US.
However, it's not only interested in deploying cell towers, but also Edge data centers.
After breaking ground on its first aggregated Edge data center in Raleigh, North Carolina, last month, the company is hoping to leverage its large footprint across the country to expand to more locations.
With real estate in cities becoming more expensive and limited, towers present the ideal location for data centers.
Telesat's Edge
Satellite players are also determined to play at the Edge.
In this supplement, Telesat explains how Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations can help them deliver Edge capabilities to their customers.
“Edge computing is moving away from a novel idea into a necessary part of dealing with the kinds of high volumes that have become the norm," says Glenn Katz, Telesat chief commercial officer.
Telesat has identifed Enterprise, aviation, maritime (including energy and mining), and government as four key industry opportunities for Edge deployments.
Private 5G and Edge in stadia
In France, Orange Business has deployed a private 5G network at one of its biggest sporting grounds.
On display was its latest Edge use cases, including a tablet to help partially sighted people feel the action of the game.
Based on a 5G Standalone network, the network can be tailored to support a range of use cases within the ground.
The carrier is adamant that 5G needs Edge compute.
Chips AI
AI accelerator chips at the Edge are tipped to disrupt the Edge AI processor market, according to Omdia, which expects the market to deliver revenues of $60.2 billion in four years' time.
Chip design startup SiMa.ai is aware of this opening, and is focused on the embedded Edge market.
The company is specifically targetting applications in healthcare, smart retail, autonomous vehicles, government, and robotics.
American Tower’s Edge bet
Edge deployments at the tower co. continue to gather pace
Edge data centers are popping up everywhere right now, as the industry looks to expand closer to the end user.
But it’s not just businesses primarily focused on data centers that are interested in Edge: Tower companies are also hedging their bets.
“We believe that the convergence between tower and cloud is something that has a long-term trajectory and will happen as the wireless operators start converting their networks to 5G and upgrading their Core,” says John Rasweiler, SVP of innovation in the US tower division at American Tower.
Paul Lipscombe Telco Editor
“As the cloud continues to grow, we see this need to have increasingly decentralized compute.”
Data center approach
Primarily a tower company, American Tower is a publicly-listed real estate investment trust that owns and operates more than 226,000 telecommunications assets across 25 countries.
The company likes other infrastructure, too. Unlike rivals such as Crown Castle, which has previously stated it’s not interested in the data center market, American Tower is all in on the idea.
In 2021, American Tower agreed to acquire data center operator CoreSite for $10.1 billion. CoreSite runs 28 data centers across 11 markets in the US, including key data center hubs in New York, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley.
“With CoreSite, our digital ecosystem and interconnection, we can use that as a platform to facilitate that distribution using our land,” Rasweiler tells DCD
“We have more than 1,000 locations across the US where we have multiple fiber providers, with land that can support multi-megawatt deployments, and we have power today to upsize the power to accommodate that build-out. So CoreSite’s ecosystem plus ATC’s land is a great combination.”
He adds that the acquisition of CoreSite has been able to drive American Tower’s approach to data center growth.
“When we acquired CoreSite, we acquired an operational business with a lot of knowledge in this space,” he adds. “There’s been a tremendous amount of collaboration between American Tower and the CoreSite teams, to be able to take best practices from the data center world and blend it with the ability to deploy that technology and those services in a massively distributed way.”
Tower Edge
While CoreSite focuses on traditional data center markets, American Tower
Jake Rasweiller
is also expanding its Edge data center footprint.
It operates several small Edge colocation sites - branded as Access Edge data centers - at existing tower locations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Jacksonville, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Denver and Boulder, Colorado
"There’s been a tremendous amount of collaboration between American Tower and the CoreSite teams, to be able to take best practices from the data center world and blend it with the ability to deploy that technology and those services in a massively distributed way"
Rasweiler explains that his company categorizes the different types of data centers into three categories: Core regional data centers, usually in Tier 1 markets; secondary hubs which are called aggregation centers; and Access Edge, typically found at the tower and usually less than 100kW.
Tower sites can make ideal sites for Edge data centers, according to STL Partners' senior consultant Matt Bamforth.
“Towers are the perfect location for micro data centers as real estate in cities is expensive and limited, hence it is very hard to build larger data centers here,” says Bamforth in a blog post last year “Plus, they are already equipped with connectivity and power – two critical factors to enable data centers.
“Tower companies (and mobile operators who still own their towers) can capitalize on this opportunity. Many next-generation applications will need compute to be brought to the last mile to achieve the necessary latency. Meanwhile, carriers are virtualizing their RAN, which will accelerate investment in data center-like facilities at towers and consolidate network equipment at these premises.”
Another infrastructure player, SBA Communications, has also invested in the Edge data center market and says it has up to 50 sites in operation or development.
Leveraging its land
Given the vast footprint of American Tower across the US, this has presented an opportunity for the company to build out beyond traditional telecom infrastructure such as towers.
While sourcing new land to build any sort of infrastructure is getting tougher in the US, it has pushed a re-think for companies to utilize the land that they own better.
“The fact that we already have the land and the presence proximate to these major markets, there's a speed-to-market advantage that we have with these assets,” explains Rasweiler. “It’s best for capital efficiency as well as being able to
leverage land that we already have.”
The company believes that tapping into Edge data centers at its tower sites is a no-brainer.
“If you think about a typical interconnect data center, it's a location where enterprise clouds and networks are all coming together,” Rasweiler says. “And these larger tower sites where we are deployed already have multiple network operators and landline operators present.
“The fact we have power, fiber, and land makes it easier to build a data center or extend the use of that land to a data center, so we think that's a natural way for us to extend the capabilities that we already have on our tower sites.”
He notes that utilizing their existing sites in this way is also a more sustainable approach.
“One of the key things we think about is sustainability, and our ability to leverage digital infrastructure on land that we already have, as it’s land that's already been put to this digital infrastructure use,” Rasweiler says. “Now we're just extending that need to the local community and our existing customers.”
Breaking ground in Raleigh
In June, American Tower broke ground on a new data center in Raleigh, North Carolina, which Rasweiler says fits into
"The fact that we already have the land and the presence proximate to these major markets, there's a speed-tomarket advantage that we have with these assets"
its plans around aggregation centers.
According to the company, the aggregation hubs are designed to extend cloud services closer to the Edge, noting the potential to enable technologies such as hybrid cloud and AI.
The 4,000 sq ft (371 sqm) facility will initially offer 1MW and is expected to go live in Q1 2025 and will be American Tower’s first.
Eventually, the site will have the potential to offer 4MW across 16,000 sq ft (1,485 sqm) at full build-out. The site will leverage direct expansion cooling and assisted hot aisle containment to offer an average of 15kW per rack.
Rasweiler notes the importance of the Raleigh build, stating that it's the first build of many aimed at offering 1MW. He told DCD that it has decided to
build the first site in Raleigh because of its existing presence in the state.
“We thought Raleigh was an interesting market, as we have a strong presence in North Carolina,” he says. “We selected that market because it's the capital of North Carolina, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country.
“It also has the ‘research triangle’ [a trio of research-focused universities] and major institutions and technology companies that are in that market, that we think are our natural customer base for what we're looking to do.”
Built to Suit
According to Rasweiler, American Tower could put data center-capable assets within 50 miles of 99 percent of the continental US population by locating them at the base of its towers.
Although currently in the construction phase, the work going on at the Raleigh site will be able to be replicated at future ATC sites, he says.
The company says that several locations have been designated as “shovel ready,” indicating that construction design has begun and aggregation Edge data centers can be rapidly built based on demand at these sites.
“We’ve approached this as more of a build-to-suit model,” he explains. “We do build-to-suits in the tower industry and we’ve been doing that for years as American Tower.
“We have land that can handle multi-megawatt facilities, plus the fiber and power. And so we are doing some early stage development to qualify those sites to be what we call shovel ready, and give us the ability to build them quickly.”
When it comes to Edge use cases, Rasweiler is excited by IoT (Internet of Things) and AI inferencing and expects them to support customer support use cases.
“We fully expect Raleigh and future Edge data centers to be able to support a wide variety of applications,” he says,
noting that the facility is designed for higher-density compute.
“On average, from day one it supports 15kW per rack, but we can support a much higher power density per rack and we can also accommodate water cooling as needed with this design.”
When asked what type of customers will use the sites, Rasweiler says he expects it to be a blend of enterprise, network carriers, and cloud providers.
Convergence at the cloud
Speaking of cloud, Rasweiler notes how significant it is for Edge devices and use cases.
"We have land that can handle multimegawatt facilities, plus the fiber and power. And so we are doing some early stage development to qualify those sites to be what we call shovel ready, and give us the ability to build them quickly"
“We believe that you're going to see this convergence between tower and cloud,” he explains. “If you look at the types of applications that are run on our primary customer's devices, they are using those applications are increasingly cloud-centric, video, and fixed wireless.
“So we saw that there's going to be a greater direct connection between wireless users and cloud and we see that as a natural extension of this. We also saw the belief that these cloud networks are going to get increasingly distributed. It's hard to predict exactly when, but we believe our land is a natural play for that.”
To support the company’s cloud capabilities, it signed a partnership agreement with tech giant IBM earlier this year.
The collaboration means that IBM Hybrid Cloud capabilities and Red Hat OpenShift will be accessible in the American Tower Access Edge Data Center ecosystem and give clients access to Edge technologies, IoT, 5G, AI, and network automation.
American Tower will deploy IBM's hybrid cloud platform and systems at its distributed real estate locations, creating an "Edge cloud," and will also be able to deploy these on-premise for customers.
At the time, IBM noted that the use of its cloud computing platform would provide more flexibility for enterprises to deploy applications – on public clouds, at the Edge, or on-premise.
“This can help to securely process and quickly analyze data closer to the point where it is created,” IBM stated in January.
According to Rasweiler, IBM is “very strong in the enterprise space, and helping customers automate and improve their operations.”
He adds: “We see that our two worlds complement each other, and their ability to solve problems for customers and deploy infrastructure plus our ability to deliver the data center that can house that infrastructure.”
US-focused… for now
Only around a fifth of American Tower’s tower infrastructure is located in the US, as it also has a sizeable footprint across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
But Rasweiler says the focus for its aggregated hubs will remain on American soil.
“We've taken a modular approach to be able to roll that out to multiple locations in the US. Let's get Raleigh going and expand in the US, and then we can think about international after that,” he says.
Rasweiler was coy on future locations or a particular timeframe for that US expansion, but says American Tower will target secondary markets to complement existing Tier 1 markets.
“We're looking at what is called the top 100 markets across the US,” he explains. “We think those are the ones that are natural for us. If you call the existing Tier 1 markets that exist today, let’s call them primary hubs, we’re interested instead in the secondary hubs.
“Raleigh certainly fits in that category, but so does Detroit, Houston, and Pittsburgh, those types of markets are also ones that we're looking at as well, to be natural extensions of those Tier 1 markets.”
Vertiv leads the way in AI-powered Edge computing
How to integrate bespoke power and cooling systems to navigate the future of data center infrastructure
Like many data centerrelated functions, Edge networks are more integrated into our society than most people realize. By decentralizing the network and interfacing between local devices and the internet, Edge networks enable raw data transmission closer to where the data is generated, rather than relying solely on centralized data centers or cloud computing. This allows us to experience reduced latency, improved performance, and greater efficiency.
DCD sat down with Martin Olsen, senior vice president of global product strategy at Vertiv to discuss how the company positions itself as a knowledgeable and capable provider of AI infrastructure solutions.
The impact of AI on Edge deployments and traditional infrastructure
In a world where we expect to run complex AI applications (think of your virtual assistants, chatbots, navigation services, and even facial recognition) as standard,
experiencing little to no latency is crucial. Edge data centers, deeply integrated into our geography, play a significant role here. However, not all data center infrastructure providers anticipated the early impact of AI on their businesses. Olsen mentions that Vertiv quickly realized customers would need help adapting their infrastructure to support AI, anticipating future needs:
“We have been investing in, for instance, liquid cooling for well over a decade – we were very early with that technology, knowing where things are going, but we very quickly saw that the industry was simply not ready for it.”
Despite this early investment, Olsen reveals the industry was slow to adopt such advancements. AI applications are pushing computing resources further towards the network Edge, yet the required infrastructure is still evolving. Deploying extensive, high-powered computing at the Edge is impractical, so instead, lightweight AI inferencing will be used, with more intensive processing happening at intermediate network points. While it’s still early to definitively say how integrating AI at the Edge will unfold, it’s evident that practicality and efficiency are paramount:
“A lot of the AI inferencing has to happen either on existing platforms or small, low-footprint computing devices, nodes, and so forth. But it'll be pervasive and this widespread use ties back to the origins of the Edge computing discussion.”
Integrating AI/HPC applications into Edge data centers
A host of challenges accompany the shift toward AI and HPC applications, requiring far more power and density. How do we feed these “AI factories” when power is scarce and cannot supply the megawattlevel capabilities?
“The hyperscalers’ recent refresh cycles have increasingly focused on supporting AI, which significantly changes power and thermal requirements. Existing data centers require a complete 180 way of thinking, where you may end up with a lot of empty space, so they need complete redesign around the existing mechanical and electrical infrastructure.”
With this comes significant cooling challenges, with demands reaching up to 150kW per rack. Designing power and
cooling systems together is crucial, as Olsen explains:
“You need to design the power and cooling systems together because they are closely connected. This close coupling means you can't consider one without the other. The other piece is that you should think through the hybrid air and liquid cooling technologies that are required because there’s still a lot of equipment that relies on air cooling.”
Vertiv's approach to AI infrastructure solutions
Olsen highlights Vertiv’s proactive approach to addressing the industry’s lack of understanding by developing new design methodologies. Vertiv has introduced five key imperatives and supporting design principles around them along with AI reference designs to help the industry adapt to AI demands. DCD’s Claire Fletcher reviewed these AI imperatives with Martin Olsen:
Be transformative.
Olsen explains: “The aspiration is to deliver more immersive experiences for customers and connect with customers in different ways, which requires profound changes to the infrastructure. Customers should be open to transformation in a way they never have before and think through their goals and what new technology they need to explore to achieve them
Be first.
Speed is crucial for gaining a competitive Edge and market share: “Being first on the market typically gives you a significant advantage for winning and taking share, so making decisions and moving quickly is absolutely paramount in that,” he says.
Be efficient.
Efficient use of existing and new investments is necessary. Operational efficiency and capital deployment are critical:
“You have existing investments in your data center infrastructure, new investments that need to be made, and future investments to consider. Within that, there are operational efficiencies as well. So
you can look at ‘Be efficient’ as both being efficient with capital deployment and operational efficiency.”
Be confident.
Companies need the confidence to take risks, and they look for credible partners with expertise to support them: “Having the confidence to take risks as the technology is so new and so transformative for most companies, that it's important for them to push the envelope and seek partners with credibility, expertise, and the portfolio to match, to ultimately reduce the risks involved.”
Be future-ready.
Infrastructure must be designed to handle rapid growth, with a focus on supporting much higher power densities: “The pace is moving so quickly, with power demands increasing from 10 kilowatts per rack to 15 or 20 over the past decade. Now, we’re looking at even greater leaps, such as supporting 100 kilowatts per rack today and potentially 500 kilowatts in five years. Being future-ready to handle these increases is crucial and directly impacts critical infrastructure challenges.”
Two key design principles are essential for integrating AI and HPC capabilities, especially in Edge installations: designing power and cooling infrastructure together and simplifying design complexity through expertise and scalability. Olsen underscores the importance of partnering with providers capable of supporting global or regional deployment needs:
“Being transformative typically drives design principles using different types of technology, like liquid instead of air, or hybrid air and liquid. So there's transformation within the design itself.”
“Designing for modularity will help you in two different ways: Prefabricating in the factory allows you to pre-test and to validate bigger chunks of the infrastructure remotely, speeding up both the initial deployment and on-site commissioning times.”
portfolio designed for seamless integration and enhanced operational efficiency in data centers. The portfolio includes power, cooling, and service components optimized to work together, simplifying decision-making for customers:
“The way we're designing and assembling these reference designs within the Vertiv 360AI solutions is aligned with various scenarios,whether it's retrofitting existing setups, building from scratch, or deploying in specific applications. It's not just a “one-size-fits-all” – these are specific designs that are tested and validated but operate as a system, specifically designed for these unique use cases.”
Setting businesses up for future success
As Olsen recounts throughout the interview, Vertiv integrates new technologies into mission-critical environments like data centers, emphasizing its comprehensive power and cooling portfolio, global footprint, and extensive deployment experience. He stresses the importance of understanding customer needs and providing tailored solutions, leveraging strategic partnerships with Nvidia and Intel to offer advanced AI and technology solutions:
“Another key piece of the puzzle is that we’ve been working with Nvidia for the past five years, even before the AI boom. Our close relationship with their engineering teams gives us the ability to understand the specific requirements on the power and cooling infrastructure side. This manifested in the very first portfolio of AI reference designs in the industry, so we can offer informed advice to our customers and partners.”
>> To explore AI reference designs and gain insights into AI imperatives, design principles, and VertivTM 360AI, visit Vertiv.com/AI.
Vertiv™ 360AI solutions
To tie it all together, Olsen introduces Vertiv’s 360AI solutions, a comprehensive
Can Telesat’s new LEO fleet muscle in on the Edge?
The operator’s Lightspeed fleet looks to offer what Starlink can’t
Laurence Russell Contributor
Image Source Telesat
The Edge is all about pushing hardware and workloads out to where the data is being collected – often in remote locations with little connectivity back to the core data center.
Satellites – including the many new services being delivered from low Earth orbit (LEO) – have long been used to transmit data long distances from remote areas.
While the LEO upstarts, such as SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper, are looking to target these enterprise use cases, they are coming up against incumbents well-used to providing carrier-grade connectivity in higher orbits and looking to adapt amid changing times in space operations.
Satellite services didn’t spring fully formed from the laboratories of Big Tech firms overnight. They’ve been ably built and operated by specialized companies for decades. Telesat, based in Ottawa, Canada, is one such operator.
Founded in 1969, it built, orbited, and operated some of the world’s first geostationary satellites in the 1970s and 1980s, though the primacy of geostationary has lost momentum more recently. Now the company is looking to enter the LEO space, offering services to Edge and government customers.
Orbiting closer to the planet at a smaller form factor, LEO satellites offer faster speeds and clearer imaging, which has drawn a lot of industry hype in recent years.
Telesat’s own entrant into low-Earth space, the Lightspeed constellation, was
announced in 2016; when completed, it’s due to comprise 198 satellites in polar and inclined orbits commencing launch via SpaceX rockets in 2026 at a 1,000 km altitude. The company believes it will be cost-effective compared to fiber and microwave alternatives, and the units themselves will possess Edge data processing for modulation, demodulation, and routing in space.
Lightspeed progress
Telesat originally contracted FrenchItalian satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space to build Lightspeed, but pivoted to another vendor, MDA, after suffering production delays.
The MDA designs are 75 percent smaller than Thales Alenia’s, at just 750kg, but claim the same performance standards. The constellation will have 10Tbps in total capacity with four 10Gbps optical inter-satellite links interconnecting the satellites, with over 1Gbps across user terminals.
Telesat’s contract with MDA also features options for the production of an additional 100 satellites for a potential 298-strong constellation, which was the number Telesat originally planned in 2020. This was due to provide 15Tbps of capacity with commercial services starting in 2021, but the project was downsized after Thales Alenia Space reportedly saw its supply chains interrupted during the pandemic.
By contrast, MDA’s CEO Mike Greenley claimed the company could produce two satellites a day after “getting up to speed” in August 2023.
That month, Telesat announced it had aligned all its funding from the Government of Canada, and hired MDA as its prime contractor. Since then Telesat has conducted its system requirements and system readiness review and hired close to 250 new people, mostly engineers.
“We are now finalizing our preliminary design review for our global ground segment including user terminals,” Glenn Katz, Telesat chief commercial officer, says. “Then in August [2024] in partnership with MDA, we’ll have our satellite preliminary design review. After that, we’ll be jumping fully into building and eventually launching.”
The company intends to scale its commercial staff by the middle of 2025 and produce satellites for initial testing in mid-2026. By the end of 2027, the company will have enough satellites to make commercial services available.
“We’ll probably spend over a billion dollars this year in capex and opex for the project,” Katz says. “You can break that down by Lightspeed’s design, which has been eight years in the making, accommodations for the ground segment, the user terminals, and the satellites themselves.”
By the end of 2024, the company hopes to announce some significant commercial agreements with strategic partners.
LEO support for Edge
In addition to providing in-space satellite computation, LEO constellations play another key role in establishing and assuring Edge capabilities.
"Once companies in the LEO market enable lower latency, you’ll see a gigantic market open up”
Telesat would be very happy to surf the wake of Starlink and Kuiper
“To handle modern demands, users in many industries need to embrace what we call collaborative Edge,” Katz explains. “This is where your operations are backed up by a network beyond fiber to guarantee resiliency or expand operations with satellite to enable a mesh network.”
While the expansive reach of satellites often suggests it’s meant for remote industry and moving assets, Katz insisted networked backup connectivity in lowEarth space supporting the collaborative Edge could serve operations in cities, assisting mission-critical public services. He believes Edge solutions will only become more ubiquitous and necessary as global digitization continues.
“The amounts of data that connectivity users use now has become enormous,” Katz says. “Edge computing is moving away from a novel idea into a necessary part of dealing with the kinds of high volumes that have become the norm.
“Once companies in the LEO market enable lower latency, which is very important when it comes to Edge computing, you’ll see a gigantic market open up – roughly $650 billion in the 2030s [across all of LEO].”
Key industries for Telesat can be broken down into four major verticals: Enterprise, aviation, maritime (including energy and mining), and government, which in turn can be disseminated into 15-17 subverticals, Katz explains.
At sea, automation is especially crucial. “A best-effort Internet connection just doesn’t cut it for connecting onshore Edge to these ships,” Katz says. “You’ve got
to have a direct, resilient, diverse set of connections. Of course, this also applies to the smart ports we’re starting to hear more about too.”
Transport on land has similar connectivity concerns. The IoT functions of vehicle video, especially autonomous vehicles, need connection assurance.
“When you apply computational Edge to [autonomous vehicles], it’s all about minimizing delay of real-time video to local Edge centers,” Katz says. “But none of it works if you can’t guarantee strong latency. We see that as a gigantic application [for LEO satellite connectivity].”
Big tech strategies
Telesat is eager to differentiate itself from Starlink and Kuiper, which Katz identifies as being motivated to connect directly to consumers.
“Our north star is our direction as a business-to-business telco-grade service, great for mobile network operators, governments, service and cloud providers, and so on,” he says.
While Starlink’s early marketing pushes communicated it to be a broadband service, its explosive growth after entering commercial service in 2021 has since featured a number of business contracts, many of which were agreed by resellers using Starlink coverage to sell via their legacy commercial relationships.
Throughout 2023, Elon Musk’s company announced reselling arrangements to industry through SES
Cruise mPOWERED, KVH Industries, netTALK Maritime, Singtel, Tototheo Maritime, Orien Reederei, and Marlink, to name a few.
But Starlink antennas are “half-duplex,” Katz says – unable to transmit and receive simultaneously. “That doesn’t work very well for Edge-type connectivity, which would prefer fiber for guarantees of latency and bandwidth as well as transmit and receive,” he explains. “We’re on the other side of the equation. We are an extension of a telco-style carrier Ethernet network at layer two.”
Starlink’s subscriber base was most recently calculated in May 2024 to be more than three million strong, with the company stating it expected to generate $15 billion in sales over 2024. Satellite market research group Quilty Space drew more conservative conclusions in May, projecting revenues of $6.6 billion.
Satellite market research group Northern Sky Research (NSR) has suggested Amazon’s Kuiper could be an even greater market threat. Kuiper intends to populate a constellation of 3,236 LEO satellites, seeking to contend with Starlink’s rapid market absorption of market share.
While Kuiper is a little behind in actually getting to space, the company has its own deals under its belt. Vodafone, NTT Docomo in Japan, and Vrio in Latin America have already contracted with further sales efforts underway.
Image Source: Thales
As with Starlink, the global nature of Kuiper’s offering has not been lost on its commercial team, who are looking well beyond the US for growth.
The extensive efforts to integrate the constellation’s performance with AWS, Amazon’s cloud platform, presents firmer Edge use cases than Starlink can. AWS software like SiteWise Edge, Athena, and Quicksight are already respected data tools likely to offer synergies with Kuiper connectivity, if not exclusivity.
On October 6, 2023, two prototype Kuiper satellites (Kuipersat-1 and 2) were carried to low-Earth orbit for testing as part of the “protoflight” mission. In May 2024, protoflight continued, demonstrating satellite propulsion tests, which will continue over the ensuing months to demonstrate additional maneuvers which will eventually cause enough drag to naturally deorbit both satellites via destructive re-entry.
“Starlink’s first-mover advantage allows it to set the pace and tone of pricing, period,” stated Brad Grady, research director at NSR at World Satellite Business Week in Paris in 2023. “They’re in the driver’s seat right now. Even though Kuiper is launching — it’s going to take them a while to get online and produce tangible market influence.”
The hype around LEO seeded by Starlink could never have been achieved by the legacy satellite operators, Telesat’s Katz argues.
Half-duplex doesn’t work very well for Edge-type connectivity, which would prefer fiber for guarantees of latency and bandwidth as well as transmit and receive
“Kuiper is only going to extend that,” he says. “This heightened interest doesn’t mean new customers are only going to consider these two players as they become convinced about LEO adoption. The market is so big that we’re wellplaced to build a strong technological focus serving enterprise, aviation, and maritime with specific services geared to our customers. Telesat would be very happy to surf the wake of Starlink and Kuiper.”
In a report published 2023, NSR estimated that the combined Starlink and Kuiper subscriber base could become some 36 million by 2030. No matter the confidence of legacy providers, now’s the time for them to reinforce their
tried-and-true reputations in the wake of saturation by deep-pocketed big tech newcomers.
While some may fight to compete, others could well be fighting to justify higher sale prices when they are sold into the new monopoly of whoever wins the Newspace race in LEO.
Sovereign LEO
A less understood trend emerging in LEO is strategic satellite capability that national security can deem “sovereign.” This refers to services procured by an end-user and developer-operator within the same country.
Anxieties over digital sovereignty heightened following the US government’s decision in 2019 to ban Chinese vendor Huawei, citing national security concerns. Several other countries followed suit, with the UK government deciding to remove all Huawei equipment from its 5G network by 2027.
With governments looking to homegrown solutions, Telesat is well placed to serve the sovereign needs of the Canadian government, which is a big investor in the company and represents a natural procurer of its services. But the concept has more nuance to it than governments simply onshoring their technological supply chain, Katz suggests.
“Lightspeed has a capability to hand off full control of our satellites and network to a country,” he says. “We’ve been having preliminary discussions with customers around the world interested in securing that application.”
The assurance of sovereign communications is becoming a “musthave” for states, which has driven the uptake of polar satellites, Katz explains. Traditionally, the commercial utility of polar coverage is very limited beyond the needs of intelligence services and the military.
“From our own end of the fence, we see Nato treating this very seriously,” Katz says. “We believe this market is undersized today because global governments haven’t yet recognized what they want and how it works, but these discussions are happening today. One day, this technology will become one of our bigger markets.”
Giving Private 5G networks a sporting chance
The Stade Vélodrome in France isn’t just a sporting arena, but also a playground for Orange to try the latest that 5G and Edge can offer
The scene is set: 67,000 fans pack into the Stade Vélodrome, Marseille, France, to witness the pinnacle of French club rugby, the Top 14 Finale.
Unfortunately, the contest at the end of June was a bit of a mismatch, with Toulouse thumping Bordeaux Bègles
59-3, bringing down the curtain on a season that started in August.
However, DCD wasn’t there to cover the match from a sporting perspective but instead delved into the connectivity that was on offer at the stadium.
The Stade Vélodrome, also known as Orange Vélodrome, was the first sports ground in France to be
connected to a 5G network.
"I think this is one of the great use cases because you have a very high density which was not the case with 4G," Laurent Godicheau, chief strategy, partner and sustainability officer, Orange Business, tells DCD
"So I think the stadium use case is a great example of the usefulness of 5G.”
Paul Lipscombe Telco Editor
Private 5G lab
To put this theory into practice, Orange Business has its own private 5G lab at the stadium, which operates as a 5G Standalone (5G SA) network.
It’s at this lab, where the carrier trials its technology to ensure it is fit for purpose for match days.
The private 5G lab, which spans more than 600 sqm, is used to demonstrate a range of different innovations and serves businesses of all sizes and local communities.
Several use cases are underpinned by the 5G network at the ground, such as private 5G media production which means Orange can utilize the cloud for application services such as video control, thus reducing the amount of equipment that it needs to deploy onsite.
“We are here in the Orange Vélodrome in Marseille and we have a camera in Lannion (in northern France, more than 1,000km away), plus we have our private cloud core network in the cloud, and thanks to that we can control everything remotely,” explains Solène Verdier, partnership success manager at Orange Business.
The telco has partnered with LiveU, which hosts its studio in the cloud and is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is also Orange’s strategic Edge partner.
Because Orange operates a 5G SA network at the ground, it is able to utilize capabilities such as network slicing, something that is critical for private 5G networks. Staff at the venue can use the private network to communicate with each other through Team Connect.
“Team Connect is a solution that uses Push to Talk,” explains Verdier. “It's like a walkie-talkie but with more functionality, similar to what you’d get with WhatsApp. It's as simple as pushing a button and connecting to somebody else on your team, such as for security and technicians.”
Verdier adds that Team Connect runs on a private network that uses Orange’s 4G and 5G connectivity. Orange claims that the service is secure from the public and one that doesn’t
suffer from interference.
For hungry spectators, Orange notes that its private 5G network can deliver a more tailored food and beverage service to people’s seats while being able to take payment via smartphone. The company says that by using a private 5G network, it’s able to adapt stocks and systems for its workers to understand what they have or need for their customers.
Orange’s Edge
One of the key features of the private 5G network is how it uses Edge computing.
“For me, Edge computing is the difference between your brain and your spine,” says Verdier, likening the Edge to a spine, where you can feel and process things immediately, with the cloud acting as the ‘brain,’ storing historic information that might be needed in
"There can be Edge computing without 5G, but 5G without Edge computing is a bit useless" future.
One such Edge use case on show at the Stade Vélodrome was Orange’s Touch to See tablet. The device, shaped like a rugby pitch, is designed for blind people to feel the action through
touch sensitivity. It’s equipped with a magnetic disc which is designed to replicate real-time movement of the ball and feel how the game is being played out on the pitch.
Orange says the technology is enabled through 5G, Edge computing, and AI, and is supported by in-ear commentary.
Don’t forget to switch it off as you leave
Orange Group has outlined plans to be a net-zero company by 2040, with Orange Business aiming to produce 45 percent less CO2 by 2030.
A key part of this strategy is to be more energy efficient, something which Orange has sought to do at sporting venues, such as the Stade Vélodrome.
Orange Business and Cisco have developed a smart power solution to intelligently power its WiFi access points using Power over Ethernet (PoE) based on real usage. It says that by doing this, it has been able to reduce WiFi energy consumption by 52 percent at the stadium.
“We have 30 big events per year, we don’t need them to have [WiFi] every day,” says Verdier, noting that it made sense to be more efficient in how the access points are used.
Assessing the Edge opportunities
In a follow-up discussion after the event, Frank De Jong, program director of Edge computing at Orange Business, expanded on the company’s Edge approach to DCD
“In the beginning, we were fighting the view in the market that Edge was all about latency, where in reality, specifically in Europe, for example, latency is not a big issue,” he says.
For countries like the US, where the distances covered are much bigger, “it may become more relevant to talk about latency,” De Jong says.
“The discussion around latency is not so important at the moment but instead around things such as the reduction of bandwidth for data privacy have been
"In the beginning, we were fighting the view in the market that Edge was all about latency, where in reality, specifically in Europe, for example, latency is not a big issue"
much more important.”
According to De Jong, Orange Business expects Edge will generate value for the smart industry by utilizing the Internet of Things (IoT). He notes that this will support areas such as worker safety within factories.
“We see the biggest take up of use cases is the smart industry area. We’re looking at how we can use Edge computing for certain use cases in this area,” he says. “On the IoT side, we’re collecting data from manufacturing processes, either the primary process or the things like predictive maintenance and sensors.”
Expanding the ecosystem
The acknowledgment of the smart industry being a pivotal beneficiary of
Edge has meant that Orange Business identified AWS as an ideal partner for Edge.
However, this wasn’t always the case, explains De Jong. The carrier initially only worked with Google as its Edge compute partner, before expanding its ecosystem to include AWS.
“We always try to be vendor agnostic, but that is difficult,” says De Jong. “Because we think Edge computing is just an extension of the cloud, it was more natural to start with Google on this, as our Edge program could only deal with one hyperscaler at a time.”
“The idea always was that we were going to take on the next hyperscaler in
"For me, Edge computing is the difference between your brain and your spine”
the program when we were on our way with Google, and so AWS was on our wishlist as it has a pretty strong offering and coverage in the smart industry.
“The smart industry is still an area where we believe we should be active, mainly driven by the fact that most of our customers have some form of manufacturing. So if we're there with the network, why don't we go there with some IoT stuff as well.”
5G needs Edge
De Jong says that Orange Business is still learning every day about the Edge, and acknowledges that, although there’s no one killer Edge application, use cases are popping up one by one, while the market begins to mature out of what he calls a deadlock.
He’s sure about one thing though; that Edge is pivotal to 5G.
“There can be Edge computing without 5G, but 5G without Edge computing is a bit useless,” he says.
“If you want to have a 5G private mobile network in your factory, we will place Edge equipment in your factory that runs the core of that 5G network,” De Jong adds. “If you need 5G, then you need Edge as well.”
The low-power AI Edge
Charlotte Trueman Compute, Storage, & Networking Editor
Edge AI chip startup
SiMa believes its combined hardware and software approach will help it become the market leader in the low power niche
The rise of Edge AI has largely been born out of increased demand for inference power available need the user, with organizations increasingly seeking to deploy AI algorithms and models onto local Edge devices.
At present, the AI chip landscape is largely dominated by a handful of vendors developing accelerators to support ever-growing workloads in the
data center. However, as the Edge grows, opportunities lie for new companies to diverge from data center architecture.
SiMa (pronounced See-ma) is one such company that is currently making waves in the Edge AI market, hoping to carve a niche for itself in the space above lower powered devices like phone chips and below the significantly more powerful data center gear.
Founded in 2018 by former Groq
COO Krishna Rangasayee, the San Jose, California-based company targets the market segment between 5W and 25W of energy usage. Thus far, it has developed an embedded Edge machine learning system-on-chip (MLSoC) that it says allows customers to run entire applications on a chip.
To date, the company has raised $270 million in funding and announced the second generation of its offering – due for release in 2025 – in April 2024. While not all of SiMa’s customers have been made public, earlier this month it announced a partnership with manufacturing organization TRUMPF, which will use the chips to develop AIpowered lasers.
When DCD spoke with SiMa’s senior vice president of engineering and operations Gopal Hegde in early July 2024, he revealed that the secondgeneration chip based on TSMC’s 6nm process technology was due to be with the company in a matter of days.
Hegde is a chip industry veteran and serial entrepreneur, who joined SiMa four years ago after a stint at Marvell, which had acquired a startup he’d previously been working for.
He tells us that SiMa is specifically
"A lot of our competitors build excellent silicon and, in many cases, their silicon may be better than ours. But nobody has software similar to what we have and nobody's trying to solve the problem as comprehensively as we are in order to address our customer needs"
targeting the embedded Edge market – which the company describes as the layer that sits between the cloud and personal devices.
SiMa believes this segment is worth around $40bn currently, and within that market, the company is pursuing applications in healthcare, smart retail, autonomous vehicles, government, and robotics.
“AI has really taken off in the data center and cloud, but it took almost 10 years for that to happen,” Hegde says. He argues that this has also been the case with Edge AI, where a unique set of requirements has caused the industry to move relatively slowly. Hegde identifies three main challenges: Cost, ease of deployment, and a lack of expertise.
Hegde says SiMa is different from other Edge AI companies in the market because in addition to attempting to address the issues around cost and expertise, its Palette software solution provides a no-code approach to Edge machine learning application development.
“[We are] actually focusing on the software infrastructure that is required to deploy AI and machine learning, that is the main difference between us
Gopal Hegde
and many other companies out there,” he says. “A lot of our competitors build excellent silicon and, in many cases, their silicon may be better than ours. But nobody has software similar to what we have and nobody's trying to solve the problem as comprehensively as we are in order to address our customer needs.”
These customer needs include the challenges posed by increasingly complex AI workloads, which Hegde says most chip vendors have reacted to by “throwing more hardware [at the workload] and hoping the problem goes away.”
Unfortunately, he says, that’s not an option for SiMa customers because they can’t deploy, for example, Nvidia’s upcoming 1kW Blackwell GPU at the Edge, as most devices deployed for Edge AI purposes have single to low doubledigit power consumption. Of course, Nvidiaa also has its own Edge offerings, including the 40-60W Nvidia A2 GPU.
“We are not making the silicon more complex but we are improving the compute and we are improving the machine learning capability,” says Hegde. “With our second generation [chip], there’s twice as much compute compared to the first generation so it can support a lot more complex applications, and the way we solve the problem is with software.”
He added that for SiMa, the “key innovation” has a lot to do with how it develops its compiler tool chain software, which enables the company to run networks very efficiently without having to deploy more hardware.
He says this approach is in direct contrast with some of the leading chip companies such as Nvidia, Intel, and AMD who just “throw more GPU cores at the problem… or more expensive memory,” which ends up making the hardware more complex, more powerhungry, and more expensive. Instead, by deploying software, SiMa has a much more efficient way of scheduling and executing machine learning instructions in parallel.
“We're keeping our fingers crossed to bring up this chip performance per watt
SiMa’s approach is in direct contrast with some of the leading chip companies such as Nvidia, Intel, and AMD who just throw more GPU cores at the problem… or more expensive memory
and we are seeing improvement over 50 percent,” Hegde says. “Compared to our previous generation on emulation platform, over the life of the product in the last two years, we’ve improved the performance by over 30 percent purely by making software tweaks to it.”
As a result, in the next 12 months, the company expects to see a roughly two times performance per watt improvement.
Competing with Nvidia
It’s almost impossible to talk about AI chips without mentioning Nvidia, and while Hegde says it's hard not to view the GPU giant as a competitor, simply because of its sheer dominance, ultimately, the two companies are targeting two very different customer bases, with the lowest power Nvidia solution offering the same power consumption as SiMa’s absolute top offering.
And while Nvidia has been setting MLPerf performance benchmarking records for cloud workloads, Hegde says the company’s performance doesn’t stack up when it comes to Edge
performance.
In August 2023, SiMa made its debut MLPerf submission in the v3.1 round and went head-to-head with Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX kit (10-40W) in the closed Edge ResNet50 benchmarking test. SiMa was able to show better latency, power efficiency, and overall performance.
“When [Nvidia] runs Edge workloads, they actually don't do very well because they are not optimized for Edge,” Hegde says. “So we went to MLPerf basically to compete with them and over three submissions (SingleStream, MultiStream, and Offline), we actually beat them every time.”
Hegde says Nvidia no longer participates in the closed Edge category, instead focusing its efforts on other submissions where the company does continue to set records.
However, while SiMa might already have edged out Nvidia on its own turf, unlike some other Edge AI chip startups that have started mulling over a future entry into the data center, Hegde notes that’s not a path SiMa is considering.
“Our ambition is to be a key player in the embedded Edge market and we want to get there by actually addressing the three major problems that we talked about: cost, ease of use and deployment, and accelerating a complete end-to-end application.
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