Since 2023, Contrivian has helped enterprises and government entities create redundancies in their fiber and 5G networks to protect mission-critical broadband connectivity from going offline. Recently, the company introduced Contrivian Constellation, which is designed to bring the same redundancy to satellite networks. Telecompetitor spoke with Contrivian CEO Grant Kirkwood about the new offering.
Kirkwood noted that latency in low Earth orbit (LEO) networks is more common and more variable than in terrestrial networks. Contrivian Constellation works by combining signals from multiple providers, like Starlink and Amazon Leo.
“We’re basically taking the customer’s traffic apart on their premise, sending it both paths, and recombining it,” Kirkwood said. “We’re not copying it — we’re sending the header data for those frames so that we can retransmit, because you don’t want to use twice the bandwidth. But you want it to look and feel like a single connection that has diversity like you’re used to on the ground. So, we bond them together.”
This combination of networks is achieved by Contrivian Constellation’s software, which tracks each network’s performance every 200 milliseconds and adjusts data packets accordingly.
Contrivian Constellation customers aren’t required to have their own Starlink and Amazon Leo subscriptions; connection with those networks is included, as well as other LEO services like OneWeb.
Currently, Amazon Leo has only a small network of satellites, and Kirkwood said Contrivian Constellation is intentionally ahead of customer demand. The company began developing the new offering about a year and a half ago, and early partners are now testing Constellation. “It’s a unique opportunity to perfect the technology because Amazon Leo isn’t yet fully operational,” Kirkwood said.
Kirkwood said Contrivian’s customers tend to have many locations — even in the hundreds — and operate in multiple regions or multiple countries. “They’re all [industries] where connectivity is really important: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, energy producers — those sorts of organizations,” he said.
Though Contrivian is focusing on medium-to-large businesses and government entities, Kirkwood said he can imagine potential partnerships with rural broadband providers to provide backup connectivity to their customers in case a fiber or 5G network is out, like a generator when the electricity goes down.
Contrivian has always been multi-modal, Kirkwood said, and Contrivian Constellation brings that notion to satellite broadband. He joked about T-Mobile’s new SuperBroadband business offering, “We’ve been doing that for three years.”
