STM claims it is the first company in the industry to support the RCS2 standard. The rollout follows an STM demonstration in June 2011, when the company displayed high-performance features of the RCS2 standard just a few months after its approval by the DVB organization.

   STM said both large- and small-network operators could reap benefits with SatLink’s DVB-RCS implementation. “In small networks with few VSATs and one or two TDMA carriers, the ACM-per-burst feature makes it so operators do not have to choose the best modulation and coding to use; it is determined automatically per VSAT with each burst,” STM said in a company statement. “Large networks benefit in this same way, plus they get additional multiplexing efficiency gains by using larger pools of TDMA bandwidth, dynamically sharing up to 50 Mbps across many thousands of VSATs. Total efficiency gains with RCS2 can be as large as 300 percent on TDMA carriers compared to legacy VSAT networks.”