Satellite Connectivity Innovation – Parth Trivedi

Obviously what you're developing is new systems and new creative software and things like that.

What's your approach to innovation? Especially if you're doing something that's pretty different and you can't just, it's not just a small iteration.

Some of these I assume are kind of some big changes.

How do you and your team approach innovation and overcoming some of those big challenges?

Actually, the need for innovation comes from constraints, comes from the boundary conditions that you are faced with when you are developing any kind of commercial system like this.

And for us, those initial conditions and boundary conditions were that, hey, you've You can't go to a phone maker or a device maker and say, here's this highly specialized antenna that you've got to use with your phone.

That just won't work.

You can't go to a chipset company and say, hey, you've got to spin a new type of chip to make it work for us.

Otherwise, it'll be limited in scale.

So for us, a strong amount of emphasis in terms of the IP that we created early on went into how do you make these existing chips and existing devices work seamlessly with a non-terrestrial or a satellite network without any changes.

Then we also think about the very pragmatic, practical things that you encounter in daily life.

As an example, you want to be able to text the way you do holding your phone in front of your face.

You don't want to be texting with the phone in your hand reached out into the sky trying to find signal, you know, doing some crazy yoga pose.

That's not the kind of experience people are used to when they're sending a WhatsApp or a text message.

So again, that's another boundary condition where we say, okay, what does it take for us to improve the signal strength between the satellite and the phone? And how can we make those improvements again with the other boundary condition of, hey, no changes to the hardware? So that resulted in what we call Skylo standards plus IP.

So there were a fundamental set of things that we did.

We contributed to the standard also that allows the connection to happen.

But then how do you take it to the next step in improving the user experience, improving capacity on the network to make this economically feasible for hundreds of millions of people to use at scale? Those are pieces of IP that our team innovated on, which we call Skylo Standards Plus, which are methodologies which are now being integrated inside chips, inside devices.

Okay.

That's interesting.

So with the growth, if we're going to have millions, hundreds of millions of phones that are going to now have this capability, is the satellite infrastructure there? I mean, I know there's a lot of satellites being launched.

Is that going to have to expand to support this new type of service?

So actually, the current set of mobile satellite systems, MSS systems, are quite robust.

They're more robust than people think.

in terms of how much power they radiate.