What Happens When The Cloud Moves Into Orbit

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Space internet is no longer a science project, and the gap between “cool demo” and “usable enterprise transport” is closing fast. We sit down with Tom Kunath from Cisco to unpack what’s actually happening behind the hype: low Earth orbit constellations that hand off satellites every few seconds, improving latency that can land in the tens of milliseconds, and the messy networking realities that show up as loss, jitter, and unexpected performance drops.

We walk through the multi-orbit picture in plain terms: why GEO is stable but slow, why MEO sits in the middle, and why LEO is the current spotlight for enterprise applications. From there, we get practical about SD-WAN over satellite. Tom shares what his testing revealed about early instability, how ground stations and oversubscription influence user experience, and what kinds of SLAs are realistic today when you design for roughly 1% loss and variable conditions like rain fade and obstructions.

The most eye-opening part is the TCP story. Even when bandwidth looks great on a quick speed test, classic congestion control can crater sustained throughput as soon as loss appears. We dig into how SD-WAN features like TCP optimization/proxy, forward error correction, and packet duplication can turn “quirky broadband in space” into a link you can actually route over with confidence. We also cover security approaches from treating satellite like the public internet with IPsec overlays, to private L2VPN style services, and the next wave of “gatewayless” satellite networks that aim to keep traffic off the ground entirely.

If you’re designing resilient branch connectivity, connecting remote sites, or planning for non-terrestrial networking and direct-to-device 5G, this conversation will sharpen your mental model fast. Subscribe, share this with a network engineer who’s skeptical about satellite, and leave a review with the biggest question you still have about LEO and SD-WAN.

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