Teleport Operations: New Technologies Help Cut Cost

There are a few primary areas which have the biggest impact on a teleport operator’s bottom line and/or the ability to improve service delivery. These broad areas include: space segment, network management systems, electricity consumption and network performance, and new technologies are making positive impacts and helping teleports improve both profits and service levels in these areas.

Dynamic Duo: DVB-S2, MPEG-4

DVB-S2 and MPEG 4 are enhanced versions of earlier technical standards, and while the new version have merits of their own, teleport operators are discovering that the transmission and video coding standard are extremely synergistic and can dramatically lower space segment utilization when used together. Broadcasters have reported saving up to 40 percent on the amount of space segment. “The deployment of MPEG-4 systems has been held back the last several years due to the high capital cost of equipment,” says Lou Zacharilla, director of development World Teleport Association (WTA). “As the cost of hardware has become to go down, we are seeing more MPEG-4 systems being deployed. An MPEG-4 video stream broadcast over a DVB-S2 carrier is extremely efficient and teleport operators are seeing dramatic improvements in space segment utilization.”

Gary Hatch, President of ATCi, which operates three teleports around the globe, concurs. “Utilizing both MPEG- 4 and DVB-S2 offers tremendous savings, especially with HD video feeds. We can take an off-air channel or one off of a fiber and encode them as MPEG-4 and then transmit them over a DVB-S2 carrier. In the past we could get 45 [megabits per second] over the link but with DVB-S2, using [three-quarter] rate coding, we are now approaching 80 [megabits per second]. We may have to use a larger antenna, but the payback is very quick.” Hatch notes that the MPEG-4 video feed must be transcoded back to MPEG- 2 at the cable head-end. “There are roughly 74 million set-top boxes in the United States and 99 percent of them are still MPEG-2. Therefore, we need to convert the MPEG- 4 video feed so it is compatible with the cable companies’ installed base of set-top boxes. There is some extra hardware involved at the headend, but the savings on space segment makes it all worthwhile.”

Teleport operators have typically grown their businesses on a project-by-project basis. Ideally, equipment purchased for one project could be leveraged in the future to bring on new customers. But businesses do not always move in a straight line, and the subsystems purchased for different projects were not always congruent. This began to change with the widespread adoption of IP — or at least shift in the right direction. Flexible IP-based solutions enable satellite operators to maximize the number of channels per transponder and reduce both capital expenditures and operating expenses. Multi-channel encoders with IP multiplexing make it possible to provision a greater range of HD and SD broadcast channels in multiple delivery formats. Instead of buying multiple encoders, a teleport now can purchase a single device that will handle multiple formats. IP multiplexing allows video channels to be distributed from facility to facility via a standard Cisco infrastructure. In addition, IP multiplexing eliminates the tangle of different types of video cables and patch panels, replacing them with Ethernet connections.

Recently, Broadcast Equipment India Pvt. Ltd (BEI) of India launched the first commercial HD and SD teleport facility in the country. Harmonic’s Ellipse 1000 contribution encoder was chosen based on its ability to simultaneously transmit MPEG-2 SD and MPEG-4 AVC SD/HD video to multiple transponders. Harmonic also offers a range of distribution encoders and a compact, multi-function stream processing platform that supports multiplexing for up to eight satellite transports in 1-RU. “With the expansion of HD television services in India, it is vital that we are prepared to handle the requirements of our broadcast customers to cost-effectively deliver high-quality HD video services to their subscribers,” said a BEI spokesman. “The versatility, feature set and output quality of the Ellipse 1000 contribution encoder are indicative of Harmonic’s video expertise.”