Until the cause of the Intelsat Americas-7 (IA-7) failure is determined, questions on when Intelsat should have figured out there was a problem will remain. But even in a catastrophic situation, there is technology that could provide some advance warning.

“When something goes catastrophic like [IA-7 did], it is never instantaneous,” Glowlink President and CEO Jeffrey Chu told Satellite News during an exclusive interview. “As the power system fails, it usually is somewhat gradual. The graduality may be a few minutes, but it is gradual.”

With that in mind, Glowlink offers its Model 1000 monitoring product-a DPS-based spectrum monitoring system that monitors the uplink and downlink activity and reports to the operator the status of a satellite or multiple satellites in a near instant fashion once an anomaly is detected. For example, a satellite might be receiving uplinks as designed, but the downlink is starting to suffer and maybe even have begun to fail.

“What [our monitoring product] would see is one transponder going dark and then the next transponder going dark,” then they know the failure could be heading to all the transponders on the spacecraft, Chu said. “Sometimes you can catch the problem before the catastrophic failure occurs and begin moving [customers] off the bird.” This kind of advanced warning, even if only a half hour or less before the failure occurs, could give operators extra lead time to move customers and make sure the downtime that would result from the relocation of a customer from one satellite to the next could be minimized.

Chu added that the Model 1000 is not only designed to catch the big disasters, but also the incremental problems, such as transponder saturation. “Our system has pattern technology that actually predicts what the transponder operating point is at, totally passively,” Chu said. He noted that Glowlink’s system can also detect interferences inside an existing carrier’s network as well as outside of it without the carrier having to turn off his system, allowing operators to determine the existence of problems such as interference or even hijacking and pirating of a signal.

(Jeffrey Chu, Glowlink, [email protected])