So as someone from an engineering background, what excites you the most about OGx?
What excites me as an engineer is innovation. And that’s one great thing about ORBCOMM—we’re constantly innovating. OGx is a fine example of that along with our investment in developing the ASIC. But from a technical standpoint, what I find interesting is how we’re tapping into the full potential of our satellites with OGx.
Geostationary satellites have three kinds of beams used to provide connectivity: a global beam which is very broad, regional mid-gain beams and super-spot beams which have the highest gain. While IDP uses regional beams, OGx is designed to leverage all three beam types, which we’ve never done before.
When would be an ideal use case for spot beams?
So, if you want to get a bit more technical, IDP is designed with a single carrier in the forward link and a single carrier on the return link. Comparatively, OGx has seven different return link carriers which have been optimized for different sizes of data. Depending on the amount of data, the terminal communicates to the network hub, which then assesses the available resources and allocates the carrier and delivery mechanism, whether it’s a spot beam or regional beam. And then that information goes back to the terminal, determining how that data will be sent, so it’s all managed within the network.
You spoke at Mobile World Congress about convergence of satellite and cellular. How do you believe OGx supports that movement towards ubiquitous connectivity?
The interesting thing about ORBCOMM is that this has been our game plan for a long time. It’s even why we became an MVNO. We’ve got satellite connectivity and we’ve got cellular connectivity, and our vision has always been to support our customers with ubiquitous dual-mode connectivity.
With satellite technology advancing, we’re starting to blur the line between cellular and satellite. If someone had said twenty years ago, “let’s add satellite to our solution and make it dual mode,” it would have been considered too expensive in terms of airtime and product costs. Even today, if a customer wants to enable dual mode, they sometimes need to add an additional device just for the satellite connectivity, which can cost hundreds of dollars.
Evolving technology is beginning to make satellite and, as a byproduct of that, dual-mode connectivity more cost-effective, which is helping with adoption. And that’s our tech-driven strategy when it comes to connectivity: bringing everything over to dual mode so customers can experience always-on connectivity at an affordable price.
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