Understanding the satcom industry's newfound obsession with PACE

Military agencies have long been ideal customers for the satellite industry because of their willingness to pay a premium for resilient communications. This year, and in particular this past month, Quilty Space has noticed an uptick in the use of the term PACE – short for Primary, Alternative, Contingency and Emergency – four ways to ensure connectivity in challenging areas.

PACE can include multiple orbits (LEO, MEO, GEO), multiple frequencies (Ka-, Ku-, L-band) and even multiple types of connectivity (satcom, LTE, Link-16). As a concept, PACE has been around for at least a decade, so why the change? The answer is Starlink.

To compete with the SpaceX megaconstellation, companies are increasingly turning to the PACE approach as an important differentiator, particularly on the user terminal. Such was the case on Gogo’s Sept. 30 conference call to discuss its $375M+ merger with Satcom Direct. Gogo management described the combined company as “uniquely positioned to win contracts under PACE,” because it can combine LEO (OneWeb), GEO (Intelsat), L-band (Viasat/Iridium) and ATG connectivity to keep military aircraft connected.

Starlink user terminals, according to Gogo, lack modems capable of switching between these options. Furthermore, Starlink would likely need to increase the number of antenna elements inside its user terminal to close links to GEO satellites, making the overall terminal larger.

Satcom Direct was one of 20 companies that won contracts under the Defense Information Systems Agency’s $900M proliferated LEO IDIQ last year. Since then, IDIQ awardees have increasingly touted their PACE capabilities, including Honeywell, Hughes, Iridium, OneWeb Technologies, SES (DRS Global Enterprise Solutions), and Viasat. Participants in DoD’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program have done the same.

Will PACE offer protection to satellite operators competing against Starlink? To an extent, yes. There’s nothing stopping Starlink, which is also on the IDIQ, from creating its own PACE-capable offering, but the company would have to partner with other satellite and/or telecommunications companies to provide such a resilient service. Given the number of customers Starlink has poached in other verticals like consumer broadband, aviation and maritime, industry players are ramping efforts in a corner of the market where the winner can’t take all (not that this means the winner can’t still take most).

Source: https://aerospace.honeywell.com/us/en/about-us/blogs/keeping-pace-with-military-connectivity-needs