High-Throughput Clearly Dominates the SATELLITE 2013 Discussion

[Satellite TODAY 03-21-13] If NovelSat CEO Itzik Wulkan is correct in his assessment, the demand for international satellite bandwidth services will have increased 2,000 percent in a 10-year timespan between 2002 and 2020, as video bandwidth demand enjoys a 100 percent increase just about every year. At the forefront of this rapid growth is high-throughput satellite (HTS) service ¬– by far, the single most discussed topic at the SATELLITE 2013 trade show and exhibition.

   The buzz around high-throughput was so strong coming into the show, that the world’s largest FSS operator Intelsat dedicated an entire hour of its top executives’ time to run through the technical basics of HTS with journalists and analysts. Intelsat CTO Thierry Guillemin and President and CCO Stephen Spengler outlined the key physics that define high-throughput service, while decoupling the platform concept with Ka-band – a bandwidth that has erroneously been married to high-throughput and massive satellites.

   While David Nemeth, the senior systems architect of satellite-based IP communications technology provider for iDirect believes high-throughput satellites are limited in scope, he also points out that no two high-throughput satellites are exactly the same. “You’re looking at it as an entire collection of bandwidth, while trying to share bandwidth across the beams,” said Nemeth, highlighting the focus of his approach to HTS service – data efficiency. 

   His method for spectral efficiency is to “spread out” carriers to take over unused bandwidth, explains Nemeth. “I can take the same amount of power and get more bits out of it,” he said. 

   At Newtec, the very small aperture terminal (VSAT) digital filtering systems it provides are so efficient that sometimes the VSAT systems can overlap carrier spacing and allow them to reuse the same channel, said Thomas Van den Driessche, Newtec’s vice-president of market strategy. “It allows for shared transponder support,” he said.

   In addition to spectrum efficiency, there are companies examining data efficiency to reduce the load on satellites. Rick Cannon, director of engineering for Datum Systems, said there are many “quirks and changes” for data providers to be aware of when implementing the techniques. One thing they must be aware of is matching the coding protocol to the type of service. Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service is not suited, for example, to DVB-S2 due to the latency involved explains Cannon. “Customers clearly are not going to find it acceptable,” he said, adding that there are other coding types that can be used instead.

   The networks must also be flexible to the traffic to change the capacity dynamically, added Mike Ashdown, CTO of Sevis Systems. Ideally, a mobile network could detect that congestion is occurring and require the use of more efficient codecs to prevent congestion from occurring. “You reduce the amount of data through the satellite and get the network to start invoking procedures when you start to detect congestion,” he said.

   Showing an example of 50 remote sites in Hawaii requiring 70 megahertz of spectrum, Ashdown applies three techniques to reduce the bandwidth required: compressing and aggregating the data, implementing remote switching to meet application needs, and optimizing the network through applying efficient codecs. While the exercise was theoretical, Ashdown shows that costs in that network decreased by 74 percent – from $2.97 million to $774,144 – after making the changes.