Spaceway Is Engaging The Market
With News Corp. engaged in negotiations with General Motors at press time, which will probably result in News Corp. gaining control of DirecTV, Hughes Network Systems and Panamsat, Spaceway might wind up with a new owner as well. However, a News Corp. spokesman in New York City said in early April that it was far too premature to discuss outcomes here.
Spaceway continues to aim for a 2Q 2004 service launch with work on two very important chips designated Maxwell and Copernicus making steady progress.
"Maxwell is being fabricated by IBM. It is a 440 Mbs digital modem ASIC, essentially a Ka-band modem on a chip. Copernicus is undergoing design verification testing," says Mike Cook, vice president and general manager of the Spaceway business group at Hughes Network Systems in Germantown, MD.
Providing all of the IP functionality, Copernicus is the service delivery link between the user IP packets and the Maxwell modem.
Cook is quite pleased with the reaction of the various ETSI working group members to the Spaceway Air Interface.
"Our interface has been well received thus far. Because our satellites are different, neither DVB-RCS nor DOCSIS would be appropriate. We have to deal with the unique characteristics of our solution, we demodulate the signal on the spacecraft enabling switching through the onboard processor and then we downlink through the phased array antenna," says Cook, who indicates that terminal production will commence in 4Q 2003.
"Spaceway is optimized for point-to-point transport services, which will include services specifically designed to compete directly with terrestrial services," adds Cook. "We have created a center of excellence for applications development in India. Among other things, they are working on video collaboration service infrastructure, along with toolsets adapted to suit our entire service portfolio which will include frame relay, IP VPN, multicast and business continuity services, to name a few."
Video collaboration, which encompasses training and work group collaboration and more, is described as supercharged desktop videoconferencing that can run simultaneously with instant messaging and file sharing components.
"Our strategy is simple. We want to fully exploit the frequency re-use and architectural flexibility that we have attained here via both the onboard processor, which represents 10,000 Pentium 4 processor equivalents, and the new phased array antenna technology," says Cook, "These will enable us to offer a unique range of highly competitive Direcway branded services."
As of late April, according to a Boeing spokesperson, the Spaceway spacecraft payload module testing with the DSP is nearly complete, the bus module testing is complete and the phased array antenna integration is nearly complete and ready for testing.
As for the El Segundo, CA-based Boeing phased array manufacturing facility, the electronics manufacturing and array integration and test labs total greater than 15,000 square feet and it currently employs more than 150 people.
Finally, in its consolidated application for authority to transfer control, which was filed at the FCC by The News Corp. Ltd. on May 2, it spells out the possibility of a new role for Spaceway in its plans for future DBS services in the United States.
"News Corp. is committed to dramatically increasing DirecTV's local-into-local commitment by providing local-into-local service in as many of the 210 designated market areas nationwide as possible, and to doing so as soon as economically and technologically feasible. Among the possibilities being studied are the use of capacity on HNS' recently expanded North American Ka-band Spaceway system, further incorporating digital terrestrial tuners into set-top boxes so that subscribers can seamlessly integrate digital over-the- air signals, and other emerging technologies."
Game Plans Emerging
Both SES Americom and Loral Skynet, which has now absorbed its Cyberstar unit, are pursuing the Ka-band market, but both seem to be headed in very different directions in the process.
SES Americom has successfully leased its entire block of Ku-band capacity, along with one polarity of the full Ka-band payload on AMC 15 to Echostar Communications Corp.
Prior to December 2003, Echostar plans to use its Space Systems/Loral-built Echostar 9 to start testing the Ka-band waters. Echostar would not divulge exactly what sort of testing would go on. At the same time, the status of its Ka-band Visionstar project is uncertain, as Echostar's request for an FCC extension has yet to be approved. .
AMC 15, with its payload of two dozen 36 MHz Ku-band transponders, and a dozen 125 MHz Ka-band spotbeams, is scheduled for launch in August 2004.
"This validates our concept of Americom2Home (A2H). We are essentially real estate developers and we have just got a very large tenant in our first building," says Kevin Smythe, senior vice president of residential satellite services at SES Americom. "We are in the process of modifying both AMC 15 and AMC 16 to make them more DTH-friendly. We have characterized A2H as replicating what SES Astra has done already in Europe with respect to wholesaling capacity to DTH providers."
A new reflector and an increase in power by 1 to 1.5 dB is what will be found aboard the upgraded AMC 15 and 16 which use circular polarity as well.
While there is no firm launch date for Telstar 8, a Ku-band forward channel/Ka-band return channel-equipped satellite, Loral Skynet expects it to be built by the end of this year. It will open the door to spot beam-based services using DVB-RCS, or whatever standard a service provider decides to implement, according to Robert Hedinger, executive vice president of sales, marketing and client services at Loral Skynet.
"Our plan is to extend our Ka-band capabilities on Telstar 8 with additional Ka-band capacity as the market develops. We want to time our infrastructure rollout so that [it] is there when it is truly needed," says Hedinger. "We can start a wide range of IP-based and VPN services at Ku-band and migrate them to Ka-band when the time is right."
"We are frequency independent. We do not look at the market as strictly a Ka-band phenomenon. Instead, we are following the market in an incremental fashion. We see an evolutionary process unfolding in terms of implementing next generation VSAT solutions with broader dynamic bandwidth allocations, and hubbed networking capabilities," Hedinger adds.
Strategies Abound
The satellite industry is pursuing hybrid networking strategies along with the rollout of Ka-band broadband multimedia services. We see this underway, for example, with Panamsat Corp.'s launch of its new virtual teleport concept involving the consolidation of six Panamsat teleports, and decision to flow Panamsat video and data traffic through Level 3 Communications Inc.'s Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)-enabled network. With this in place, Panamsat customers will now be able to access this hybrid network via Level 3 points of presence (POPs) in 70-plus cities in the United States and Europe.
Path 1 Network Technologies Inc., based in San Diego, is providing its Cx1000 IP video gateway technology for this hybrid network. "Panamsat is using the Path1 CX1000 IP video gateways as part of the virtual teleport project to interconnect our teleports for transport of broadcast-quality video over fiber networks," says Bridget Neville, Panamsat's senior vice president, engineering. "We are also using a Tandberg 6120 to provide similar functionality to the Path1 product. The video over IP technology is geared toward contribution of broadcast-quality video. The video over IP technology is relevant to our ground infrastructure (fiber and teleports), and is therefore agnostic to the satellite frequency, whether C-, Ku-, Ka-, or even X-band."
Path 1's solution was demonstrated recently by ND Satcom, which used the video gateway to encapsulate and encode a high quality video signal via an ASI port into the Fast Ethernet port of the ND Satcom SkyWAN system
"Such a device is always required if a video signal is available via an ASI port and needs to be transferred via the Broadband Media Network solution. Our solutions work well with Ku-band, C-band and Ka-band geostationary satellites," says Peter Neu, manager of product marketing at ND Satcom. "The questions surrounding Ka-band involve cost, which is expected to come down, especially for the ODU, and availability, which is expected to be worse than with Ku-band because of rain fade. So, it will depend on customer requirements, applications and the specific rain zone where the customer is located."
"Today, most Ka-band projects are dedicated to the residential and SOHO business. Our approach is targeting high performance, professional applications for broadcasting and media companies. High quality and reliability is key so Ku-band is adequate," adds Neu.
The emerging broadband multimedia marketplace will also be impacted significantly by advances in MPEG-4 encoding, and solutions that transcode pre-compressed MPEG-2 satellite video channels to H.264-enhanced MPEG-4 a.k.a. MPEG-4, Part 10.
For example, Santa Clara, CA -based iVast paired up with VideoTele.com, a division of Tut Systems Inc., to offer an MPEG-4-based digital headend. iVast has devoted considerable man hours to developing standards-based, interactive digital media solutions.
"Yes, iVAST's MPEG-4 solution will match MPEG-2 video quality at a lower bandwidth. This can yield 2x or 3x bandwidth savings, or broadcasters can use the same bandwidth to deliver higher quality video such as HDTV," says Alex Derecho, vice president of professional services at iVAST.
By taking advantage of MPEG-4's inherent compression efficiency and system layer support, iVAST is focused on enabling the delivery of high quality, rich media with previously unobtainable bandwidth efficiency, according to Derecho.
"We expect broadcasters to migrate to MPEG-4. Our indications are that they'll likely do so to address the bandwidth issues associated with delivering HDTV first," Derecho adds. "The iVAST product suite will enable both increased channel density and the ability to offer more compelling services on existing Ku-band platforms."
These changes are coming fast and furious. Broadband multimedia via Ka-band and new terrestrial wireless breakthroughs including Wi-Fi, video over IP and MPEG-4/H.264, unite under the banner of content delivery, whether the content in question arrives in real-time or not. To the extent that new digital encoding platforms and compression schemes, along with advances in video over IP, free up Ku-band capacity, this will impact on the demand side of the satellite transponder market as a whole, and it could reshape broadband multimedia strategies in a dramatic fashion going forward.
However, there are bound to be differences of opinion here. "Because the application is part of a broadcast solution, there is no direct correlation between our video over IP terrestrial service and Ka-band broadband multimedia technology," says Neville.
In a nutshell, how much goes up in the sky, and how much stays on the ground will certainly help to determine the future of the new cluster of Ka-band satellite broadband multimedia ventures.
Peter J. Brown is Via Satellite's Senior Multimedia & Homeland Security Editor. He lives on Mount Desert Island, ME.
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
