DOCSIS Over Satellite: The Curtain Opens
With beta testing in full swing, according to Wildblue CEO Tom Moore, Wildblue's plans for offering affordable broadband Internet access are shifting into high gear. In fact, by May Wildblue expects to have its first customer and first two gateways offering its DOCSIS over satellite-driven services in select areas. Downstream speeds up to 1.5 Mbps, and prices as low as $49.95 per month lie at the heart of this venture. Ka-band capacity on Telesat's Anik F2 satellite, and later Wildblue-1 (construction is slated for completion this quarter) will require the support of 5 regional gateways in the US.
"As we have said many times in the past, we will not go to commercial launch until we are completely satisfied that we are ready for commercial launch. We are entering beta testing right now, and things are going very well. We are very focused on meeting early expectations, and meeting them superbly," says Moore.
"The demand for broadband over satellite is extremely robust where access is most restricted. One of our distribution channels is via the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) made up of 1,000+ rural telephone and electric companies," adds Moore. "NRTC has made a significant investment in Wildblue, and several hundred of their members have put up real money to get non-exclusive distribution rights. They cover eight to 10 million homes, and these are the exact homes that Wildblue is interested in."
When Wildblue started, it was one of 22 Ka-band licensed providers in North America. Moore emphasizes that Wildblue was one of the few who pursued an approach of bent-pipe, spot beam architectures.
"We were the only service provider that sought to utilize off-the-shelf terrestrial standards technology," says Moore. "The biggest challenge facing Wildblue is overall operational execution. Our DOCSIS architecture allows us to use off-the-shelf back office and network management software which many folks are already very familiar with--we're not inventing anything new. This approach makes our job a bit easier."
Wildblue is not the only DOCSIS-based service, and at California-based Viasat, Inc., Jorge Vestoli, vice president of global sales and marketing, points to others who are embracing DOCSIS, as well.
"Intelsat, Telesat and Pegaso in Mexico and Latin America. Eutelsat has it, and intends it for consumer use, but has run only limited trials with it," says Vestoli. "ViaSat which is technology agnostic has agreements to provide our Surfbeam DOCSIS platform to more than 10 different satellite service providers operating on four different continents, and we are in discussions with a number of others. These service providers offer a range of broadband access via satellite to their consumer, SOHO and SME customers."
Viasat's Surfbeam platform is based primarily on DOCSIS 1.1 that provides quality of service (QoS) controls that allow deployment of tiered services, value-added services such as VoIP, security features and other configurations for broadband networks. According to Vestoli, the primary additions in DOCSIS 2.0, such as CDMA return channel waveforms, have not been incorporated since Surfbeam uses enhanced forward and return channel waveforms designed to operate efficiently over satellite.
"Widespread consumer acceptance of broadband access via satellite will require a user experience similar to cable or DSL at an affordable price. The capacity and speeds available with Ka-band spot beam satellites such as Telesat's Anik F2 offer the potential to match the performance of terrestrial service in terms of raw throughput, but successful service rollout will depend on many other factors. Ease of CPE installation and provisioning, network stability, and customer support, to mention a few," says Vestoli. "Although it remains to be seen whether the IPoS standard will be anything more than an unveiling of the HNS-proprietary VSAT protocol, a convergence of industry trends is creating opportunities to apply technologies developed in the terrestrial space to satellite and, in the process, improve the user experience."
Vestoli points to Firefox and other browsers which have incorporated more advanced HTTP protocols, such as pipelining, which can be exploited in the satellite environment to speed up delivery of Web objects.
"The drive to push gigabit and terabit speeds on terrestrial networks is exposing the same bandwidth delay problem that satellite experiences with smaller pipes and longer delays. As protocols are standardized to solve these problems for terrestrial networks, the technology will be ported (?) to the satellite environment, removing the need for satellite-unique processing," says Vestoli.
For its DVB-RCS-based Linkstar platform, Viasat is continually improving the suite of return channel bandwidth allocation algorithms to support expanding customer applications, but in fact, few Linkstar customers are taking advantage of DVB-RCS at this time.
"DVB-S2 brings the latest modulation and coding to the outbound leg of hub-spoke networks. As soon as silicon is available, we will incorporate it into our Linkstar platform. Another feature of S2 is its ability to support multiple code rates in a single outbound data stream, the so-called multi-rate PHY, a capability which is highly desirable for large networks, and already implemented in our Surfbeam DOCSIS platform," says Vestoli. "Surfbeam, and not Linkstar, is what we would recommend for any venture offering consumer services to 10,000s of customers at this point."
According to Robert Feierbach, executive director and board member at Torino, Italy-based Skylogic, a Eutelsat company, Skylogic is currently using and managing 14 Viasat hubs over 10 satellites from Europe, from which it can provide broadband satellite services for 80 percent of the world's population.
"All of our current hubs use the Viasat field-upgradeable software, which has implemented the MPEG profile of DVB-RCS. Our hub's DVB-RCS compliance was demonstrated using a Viasat and Eutelsat co-authored test plan during June of 2004, and will be submitted for formal certification once a third-party DVB-RCS authority is in place," says Feierbach. "During the coming months, Viasat will continue to deliver more enhancements to the modules of the DVB-RCS specification, such as the ATM profile implementation and others."
"Our company's market for two-way broadband services is almost exclusively in the corporate sector, through a network of worldwide integrators and distributors, who provide off-the-shelf broadband solutions, dedicated bandwidth solutions for corporate applications and VPNs, and worldwide networks," he adds. "We will consider a consumer market service in the future, if and when the user equipment costs reach impulse-buy consumer electronic levels, be they with DVB-RCS systems or other technologies."
The Price Must Be Right
Satellite broadband service providers who target consumers face well-entrenched competitors. In Silicon Valley, for example, bundled broadband offerings from Comcast and SBC are extremely popular, according to Steve Serafin, president of Silicon Valley Satellite in San Jose, CA. Price is definitely an issue. The aggressive posture adopted by cable and the Baby Bells " rolling out fiber backbones and launching their triple plays (voice-data-video services) " will not make life any easier for satellite service providers going forward. Offering video only could be a very risky proposition indeed.
"My Direcway or Starband plan starts at $59.99 to $99.99 per month. While I still get several calls a day, but when the caller is told about the monthly fee, and the $500 terminal cost, we do not get a lot of takers. We still manage to get lucky a couple times a month though," says Serafin. "Wildblue would allow us to broaden our lineup with a more reasonable offering, but that will not happen until 3rd quarter, that is, if it works. Certainly, 1 to 3 Mbps download speeds will give us the edge on DSL and/or cable modems for speed, but at what price? Anything over $49.95 is a dead duck."
So, is the broadband via satellite technology ready, will Ka-band turn the tide, and do the consumer business models finally make sense? We will know better in the coming months. One thing is certain, there is no turning back.
Peter Brown is Via Satellite's Senior Multimedia & Homeland Security Editor. He also volunteers as a satellite technology and communications advisor to the Maine Emergency Management Agency.
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