Network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider Nitel added a new satellite connectivity option that will allow customers to add more performance to their SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) deployments in remote locations or even rely more exclusively on just that satellite connection.

Mike Frane, chief product officer at Nitel, said that the new satellite connectivity option is from an established – though unnamed – low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite provider. This service will provide users with round-trip latency of less than 100 milliseconds, which is quick enough for multiple use cases.

“We've been working for a while now to introduce this LEO offering, which is much higher bandwidth, much lower latency, and we're finding that a lot of customers are very interested in integrating it as a secondary or tertiary network access and a lot of their locations and in some of the locations as primary when there’s just nothing else available,” Frane said. “It really fits well into our foundation. The core of Nitel is the access and the aggregation and they use it a lot in their SD-WAN and their SASE deployments as they get high resiliency and high reliability of the network.”

LEO satellite constellations operate relatively close to Earth at a height of less than 1,000 kilometers and are able to make a full Earth orbit in around 90 minutes. This allows a LEO constellation to provide relatively low latency compared to satellites that operate in medium-Earth orbit (MEO) or geostationary (GEO) orbit at the expense of coverage per satellite.

A number of satellite providers operate LEO constellations.

Starlink is viewed as an early leader in the space due to its LEO capabilities and vertical integration with parent company SpaceX. Other providers in the space include AST SpaceMobile, which has been working with operators AT&T and Vodafone on 4G LTE and 5G-based satellite services; SES, which recently launched its fifth and sixth satellites into orbit and is working with NTT DoCoMo on private 5G and edge services; and Iridium, which last week unveiled its new “Project Stardust” initiative.

Frane noted the move to add a LEO component followed on Nitel’s past experience with a lower performing GEO satellite-powered service, which provided higher latency and lower speeds. The move to LEO also should be more compelling to enterprise customers.

“LEO has really improved the game when it comes to the ability of the customer premises equipment (CPE),” Frane said. “The simplicity of even connecting with the CPE and keeping it connected and keeping the connection solid. We're finding it to be much more reliable and much better performance than the older technologies.”

Frane said he thinks the LEO offer will build on legacy GEO opportunities as well as areas where cellular technologies like 5G and 4G LTE are still absent.

“Then are still a lot of locations that have poorly performing LTE, they don't have 5G just because of the way that 5G operates,” Frane said. “I think we're going to see [LEO] creep in toward the suburban and urban areas more than we saw with GEO because even a marginal 4G connection was better in a lot of cases than a GEO connection, but you're not going to see that with LEO. You're going to see much better performance in the fringe or the haze around the urban and suburban areas.”

Frane said Nitel’s NaaS service also allows users to either tap into the vendor’s own SD-WAN or SASE offerings or they can bring their own, now with satellite connection capabilities.

“They can bring their own, they can integrate this with their existing deployments, and then it functions just like another access type of network,” Frane said.

Frane added that the LEO satellite service is available to Nitel customers in more than 35 countries. This international expansion builds on Nitel’s move early last year as part of its FasTrack NaaS offering. That system is a specialized service delivery process geared toward quick network deployment and designed to accelerate broadband and internet delivery times.

Nitel’s satellite expansion also follows similar moves by other managed service providers.

MetTel added Starlink connectivity to its VMware-powered SD-WAN service in late 2022. MetTel CTO Ed Fox told SDxCentral at that time that the company found Starlink provide lower latency than any other satellite providers the company had tested.

“All this testing that we've done and the feedback from the alpha is telling us that the real-time applications from a video and voice perspective were just the same as they are over broadband connections,” Frane added.