--- title: LEO Season & Vertically Integrated Connectivity description: Contrivian's Grant Kirkwood and Tom Daly explain why failover is a failure and how software can combine fiber, mobile, and LEO constellations for resilience. image: https://resources.telegeography.com/hubfs/Contrivian%20podcast%20thumbnail.jpg --- [![TG\_LOGO](https://resources.telegeography.com/hubfs/TeleGeography%20Hub%20Theme%20Nov%202025/images/TG_LOGO.svg)](https://www2.telegeography.com/) - [About](https://www2.telegeography.com/about-us) - [Research](https://www2.telegeography.com/our-research) - [Products](https://www2.telegeography.com/products) - [Solutions](https://www2.telegeography.com/solutions) - [Resources](https://resources.telegeography.com) [Log In](https://www.telegeography.com/login/login?service=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegeography.com%2Faccount%2Fhome%2Findex) [Contact](https://www2.telegeography.com/contact-us) ###### Data and Analysis Tools - [Data Center & Interconnection Research Service](https://www2.telegeography.com/data-center-interconnection-research-service) - 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They also cover the quirks of LEO networks and what this means for first responders, energy providers, and enterprises. - **Failover vs. active-active connectivity:** Kirkwood and Daly argue that failover is a destructive event because users are already affected when it triggers. - **Monitoring beyond "is the link up?":** Daly explains why a simple ICMP ping isn't enough, and what their platform does instead. - **AI's demands on the network:** Why enterprises can no longer just throw bandwidth at the problem and what they must focus on. - **How LEO has evolved for enterprise:** How LEO has moved from a remote-area curiosity to a core part of the network. - **Contrivian Constellation and multi-constellation bonding:** This software orchestrates multiple satellite constellations. Its aim is to create "diversity going up instead of sideways," in place of the old fiber-route diversity that depended on KMZ files and carrier maintenance schedules. - **Technical challenges of blending access types:** Fiber, mobile, and LEO. - **Where the LEO market is heading:** Performance keeps improving, and new inter-satellite and ground-to-ground services are expected to launch starting next year. **[About Contrivian](https://contriviangs.com/) &** [**New Government Solutions Division**](https://contrivian.com/contrivian-launches-government-solutions-division-to-deliver-secure-mission-critical-connectivity-for-us-federal-agencies/) #### Key takeaways: On a recent episode of *TeleGeography Explains the Internet*, Contrivian's Grant Kirkwood and Tom Daly made a provocative case: the traditional primary-and-backup network model is broken, and LEO satellites are helping to fix it. ## Failover is a destructive event Most enterprises rely on a primary link with a secondary on standby. Kirkwood argues that failover isn't a safety net but a destructive event, because by the time a health check fails and traffic swings to the backup, users are already affected. Daly points to dropped Zoom calls, severed remote desktop sessions, and stacked VPNs that take 10 to 15 minutes to recover. Solar and hydro plants can't report data to grid operators during an outage. Contrivian's goal is to eliminate failover entirely by keeping multiple paths active at once. ## Beyond "is the link up?" Active paths only work if you know which ones are truly healthy. Daly says a simple ICMP ping isn't enough. He recounts a cable modem that dropped a customer into a "walled garden" over an unpaid bill: pings succeeded, but no real traffic could pass. Contrivian's Lighthouse platform instead checks each layer of the stack, runs DNS queries and TCP handshakes, and matches each application to the best connection, since a video stream and a voice call have very different needs. ## AI changes the math AI raises the stakes. Daly notes that a multi-megawatt pod of GPUs only pays off if data reaches it, and suddenly TCP congestion control matters. Enterprises can no longer throw bandwidth at the problem. They have to reduce latency, jitter, and packet loss. ## LEO grows up Kirkwood says LEO's reputation was shaped by sluggish airline Wi-Fi, and for a while it was seen as a fix for remote places only. Over the past three years it has become a core part of the network, and it is increasingly used to replace terrestrial diversity, even in urban cores. His reasoning is that a path through space is more diverse than fiber in a trench or on a pole that may still end up at the same central office. It isn't a like-for-like replacement for fiber, he cautions, and it takes real engineering to make it work for enterprise requirements. ## Diversity going up, not sideways Contrivian Constellation, announced in March, uses software to orchestrate multiple satellite constellations as one bonded service. Kirkwood says it creates "diversity going up instead of sideways," replacing the old approach of designing diverse fiber routes while agonizing over KMZ files and carrier maintenance windows. ## Blending different networks The hard part is that fiber, mobile, and LEO all fail differently. Fiber gives a clear failure signal. Mobile adds carrier-grade NAT and performance-enhancing proxies. LEO is lossy but predictable: roughly every 15 seconds, an 8 to 30 millisecond window as the constellation reconfigures can drop packets. Daly's answer is to retune the whole stack around a network you understand rather than one you wish were perfect. ## What's next for LEO Kirkwood says the science-experiment phase of LEO is over and expects performance to keep improving. New constellations launching starting next year will offer ground-to-orbit-to-ground point-to-point links, a possible alternative to subsea cable at gigabit speeds, though without the throughput of multi-wavelength fiber. [![TG\_LOGO\_color\_horizontal\_SIMPLIFIED 1](https://resources.telegeography.com/hubfs/TeleGeography%20Hub%20Theme%20Nov%202025/images/TG_LOGO_color_horizontal_SIMPLIFIED%201.svg)](https://www2.telegeography.com/) [Login](https://www.telegeography.com/login/login?service=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegeography.com%2Faccount%2Fhome%2Findex) [Contact Us](https://www2.telegeography.com/contact-us) ###### [About](https://www2.telegeography.com/about-us) - [Research](https://www2.telegeography.com/our-research) - [Products](https://www2.telegeography.com/products) - [Solutions](https://www2.telegeography.com/solutions) - [Demo](https://www2.telegeography.com/demo) ###### [Press](https://www2.telegeography.com/telegeography-press) - [Events](https://www2.telegeography.com/telecom-events) - [Careers](https://www2.telegeography.com/careers) ###### [Resources](https://resources.telegeography.com/) - [Podcast](https://www2.telegeography.com/telegeography-explains-the-internet-podcast) - [Newsletter](https://www2.telegeography.com/subscribe-to-telegeography-emails) - - All Rights Reserved 2026 - [Privacy Policy](https://www2.telegeography.com/privacy-policy) ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Greg Bryan", "url" : "https://resources.telegeography.com/author/greg-bryan" }, "dateModified" : "2026-11-05T13:15:00.701Z", "datePublished" : "2026-11-05T13:15:00.000Z", "headline" : "LEO Season & Vertically Integrated Connectivity", "image" : [ "https://resources.telegeography.com/hubfs/Contrivian%20podcast%20thumbnail.jpg" ], "mainEntityOfPage" : { "@id" : "https://resources.telegeography.com/leo-season-vertically-integrated-connectivity", "@type" : "WebPage" }, "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://resources.telegeography.com/hubfs/assets/telegeography/telegeography-logo-blog.png" }, "name" : "TeleGeography" } } ``` ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org/", "@type" : "WebSite", "image" : "https://www2.telegeography.com/hubfs/Website/assets/logo/telegeography-logo.svg", "name" : "LEO Season & Vertically Integrated Connectivity", "potentialAction" : { "@type" : "SearchAction", "query-input" : "required name=search_term_string", "target" : "{search_term_string}" }, "url" : "https://resources.telegeography.com/leo-season-vertically-integrated-connectivity" } ```