Hybrid connectivity has become increasingly popular as a means for optimising communications in the defence sector globally. Promising a seamless integration of multiple network technologies, it aims to provide enhanced situational awareness, reliability, flexibility, and performance. However, upon closer examination, what many believe to be hybrid connectivity, isn’t truly hybrid.
Tristan Wood, managing director of Livewire Digital, a company well-versed in providing connectivity to government, telcos, and defence, examines this very dilemma, and argues that in most cases it fails to deliver on its promises.
Like no other, the defence sector requires fail-safe connectivity. It continuously operates in diverse and challenging settings, where seconds matter and situational awareness is key. It is reliant upon failsafe, and robust connectivity at all times to inform decision making. To do so, communication channels need to be optimised through hybrid connectivity, regardless of geography and availability of traditional terrestrial networks.
Furthermore, with drones, or uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) being increasingly tasked to go beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) for the commercial and operational benefit to all, failsafe connectivity becomes even more pivotal, with footage live streamed to the remote pilot, and indeed control rooms and commanders. The key to being able to manage strategic and tactical operations from anywhere, to anywhere – human to human or machine to machine – is true hybrid connectivity.
For defence – whether on land, in the air, or at sea—reliable connectivity solutions are crucial. They facilitate swift information exchange, enhance situational awareness, and support intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) efforts, enabling seamless command and control. These robust connectivity solutions are essential to ensuring the safety of both victims and personnel in challenging scenarios.
To understand how hybrid connectivity supports the military, we first need to think differently and take a close look at the ‘classic networking approach’, and how failover, whilst offering a degree of resilience and redundancy, isn’t truly hybrid.
Failover refers to the ability of a system to switch to a backup connection when the primary connection fails. While failover mechanisms do indeed provide a level of redundancy, they do not fundamentally transform the nature of the connectivity architecture. As a consequence, the degree of resilience is inherently constrained.
In a truly hybrid – or ‘heterogeneous’ – network, multiple network technologies seamlessly work together, actively sharing the load and resources, combining, and bonding together a variety of bearers from cellular, point-to-point radio, to satellite and Wi-Fi into a single ‘pipe’. In this way, it can deliver a faster and, more importantly, more reliable service.
In fact, a truly hybrid platform should go a stage further than this, accommodating and dynamically adapting to a range of other variables, depending upon each bearer’s performance and other environmental conditions affecting it at any one moment in time in order to optimise performance – a critical feature to all personnel.
This ability to optimise connectivity, even in the most challenging conditions, will deliver a truly consistent and uninterrupted user experience. In critical operations, where connectivity can be the difference between life and death, hybrid and resilience take on a whole new meaning.
Failover, on the other hand, relies primarily on a backup connection to take over in case of an outage, without actively utilising the strengths and capabilities of both primary and secondary connections simultaneously. It is the concept of failover, I would suggest, which challenges the traditional orthodoxy of what hybrid connectivity really means.
The need to be able to ‘connect’ within any given environment, regardless of whether terrestrial infrastructure is available or has been compromised is now more significant than ever. Live streaming of video, the transfer of data and the continuity of voice calls are crucial, and defence will always require multiple ways to communicate with fallback options.
With the relay of live video no longer the preserve of news organisations, but a mainstay of multiple sectors and even consumers, the biggest challenges are no longer around relaying footage from A to B, but with the network and available bandwidth. Now, the key to delivering the highest quality video is bonding available networks to increase bandwidth, seamlessly correcting errors and optimising the link.
Even the cars we drive and the appliances we use daily are harnessing variations of satellite, Wi-Fi and cellular communications, and with low earth orbit (LEO) satellites becoming more and more accessible, the applications and opportunities are endless.
Threats have extended beyond the battlefield
Integrating different network technologies from diverse sources introduces additional security challenges and consideration across various network endpoints and connection points. The lack of a unified security framework can result in vulnerabilities and inconsistencies that make the overall network infrastructure more susceptible to cyber threats.
In August 2023, the UK MOD awarded BAE Systems a five-year, £89M R&D contract to lead a consortium in developing ‘Trinity’, a secure battlefield telecommunications Wide Area Network (WAN) linking personnel, UAVs and aircraft, aircraft carriers and command centres. While it is yet to be seen how true the hybrid nature of this system will be, what is clear, is that there is a very real appetite to ensure critical communications are secure, and robust on the battlefield.
Why does all this matter?
The old adage says that if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got. But that’s not the case in networking. If you do what you’ve always done in a networking environment, where the explosion of tech, the amount of data being transferred and the sheer weight of traffic vying for space on our heavily congested networks, you will in fact get considerably less than you always got.
So, we need to think differently. Many hybrid systems are not the least bit hybrid, they simply provide a backup where the switchover is often measured in minutes. While this might be adequate for some, it doesn’t meet the evolving requirements of military strategy and operations.
In the contemporary landscape of warfare, the defence sector increasingly relies on hybrid connectivity to enhance communication, intelligence, and strategic capabilities on the battlefield. bonding diverse technologies such as 4G/5G, PTP radio, satellite, and Wi-Fi ensures a resilient and robust network infrastructure. This diversity allows for seamless data transmission across varied terrains and scenarios, providing real-time situational awareness and enabling rapid decision-making.
The synergy of these connectivity technologies is pivotal in creating a reliable and resilient communication backbone for defence operations. Whether in urban environments, rugged terrains, or remote locations, true hybrid connectivity ensures that military forces can communicate effectively, share critical information, and coordinate seamlessly, enhancing overall operational effectiveness and mission success.
To achieve full hybrid connectivity, and as part of a European Space Agency (ESA) contract, we at Livewire Digital developed RazorLink, an industry-first Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution that can seamlessly and dynamically bond any number of bearers, from satellite, cellular, Point to Point radio, Wi-Fi and terrestrial services in line with user-defined objectives and prevailing conditions. This is a true hybrid, a WAN which is capable of efficiently combining high latency VSAT with low latency cellular, and any range of other bearers in-between to create an aggregate service with optimised configurable bandwidth. In environments where seconds matter most, it’s only this true hybrid that will give personnel robust and failsafe connectivity for situational awareness and instant decision making on the digital battlefield, now, and in the future.
ENDS
Notes to editor
About Livewire Digital
For more than thirty years Livewire Digital has been pioneering connectivity solutions for clients in diverse and often challenging settings where access to video and other data is mission-critical.
Inventors and innovators in network technologies, Livewire Digital’s software team based in Leatherhead, has brought ground-breaking solutions to market which have been transformational in fields as diverse as television broadcasting, defence, satellite communications, telemedicine and cellular network operations.
Founded by Tristan Wood in 1991, Livewire Digital has assembled over the ensuing years an unrivalled team of specialists with unparalleled knowledge and expertise in delivering the fastest most resilient connectivity solutions to suit the most demanding environments.
It was the first company to introduce commercial narrow-band video via mobile satellite terminals, and developed a comprehensive hybrid-WAN & WAN-optimisation solution for the maritime and land mobile markets. Livewire Digital is the leading edge worldwide when it comes to designing Software Defined Networking solutions that operate over cellular, terrestrial and satellite services.