Quintillion and Equinix Work to Bring Next-Generation Services to Polar Orbiting Satellites

Apr 26, 2021

April 26, 2021

 Quintillion announces its next-generation ground station architecture in support of the highest latitude satellite ground station on U.S. soil. Quintillion's new Arctic ground station, completed earlier this year, will be directly connected via fiber to Equinix SE2 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center in Seattle, where it will connect to Equinix Fabric™, a software-defined interconnection service that allows any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and any other company's infrastructure on Platform Equinix. Equinix Fabric will enable Quintillion customers to tap into Equinix's rich digital ecosystems and seamlessly connect with other physical or virtual services available on the trusted Platform Equinix®.

The ground station, operated in conjunction with ATLAS Space Operations, is located at 72 degrees latitude in Utqiagvik on the north slope of Alaska. The 3.7-meter antenna operates in the S and X bands and expects to see up to 12 polar orbiting satellite passes per day.

Satellite ground network infrastructure is on the cusp of a fundamental change. New developments, such as small cubesats, software-defined payloads, new multi-orbit and multi-band satellite architectures, advancements in electronically steered antenna technology and cloud-based analytics, are making space an exciting but increasingly complex and dynamic marketplace. Such investments in the space hardware, satellite communications, and sat-to-ground (EO, TT&C) sectors have the potential to drastically alter the dynamics of a matured, five-decade old industry.

"Space communications is an important component in many enterprises' overall digital strategies.  As the world's digital infrastructure company, Equinix is meeting these critical needs by advancing our next-generation platform strategy to include satellite access and assist our customers' IT transformation efforts," says Jim Poole, Equinix's Vice President of Business Development.

"Satellite customers can dynamically scale their digital infrastructure needs by accessing the ecosystem of service providers at Equinix, without needing to worry about building all of the infrastructure themselves," he said.

"Polar orbiting satellite operators now have a choice to deliver their data at high latitude, on U.S. soil and directly connected to Equinix data centers in Seattle," says Michael McHale, Chief Revenue Officer at Quintillion. "This partnership will simplify the downlinking and processing of time-sensitive data for polar orbiting satellite operators."