World of Satellite-News Updates

[Red]

Galaxy Expands Ka-Band SkyDATA Service to Eastern Canada
March 20, 2013
Galaxy Broadband Communications will launch a new Ka-band beam on its SkyDATA Enterprise class service covering Central and Eastern Canada, including Northern Ontario, Northern Quebec and the western areas of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Canadian satellite communications company announced March 19.
The new service is scheduled for an April 15 launch using Telesat’s Ka-band spot beam on Anik F3. Galaxy originally launched its SkyDATA platform last year on four Ka-beams to cover the Western half of Northern Canada and aims to expand to Eastern Canada.
“We offer a truly world class managed service on a reliable yet cost effective platform,” Galaxy Founder, CEO and President Rick Hodgkinson said in a statement. “Our customers are seeking more and more bandwidth to support mission critical applications, morale services to work camps and reliable quality VoIP communications. The additional Ka-spot beam will expand our coverage area to the resource rich areas of Eastern Canada. We have shown the market that our SkyDATA Managed Ka- service is both reliable and cost effective. Leveraging the cost efficiencies of Ka- with some really interesting technology, we deliver to our customers a fast, predictable service for an affordable price.”

 

[Red]

On Call to Develop Second Generation of QuickSPOT
March 20, 2013
On Call Communications is developing the second generation of its QuickSPOT on-demand satellite network aiming to expand with higher upload speeds, dual feeds and new flexibility to choose between on-demand and scheduled service, the company announced March 19.
For this next generation network, On Call has selected the Romantis Universal Hardware Platform (UHP). QuickSPOT is designed to allow broadcast news and sports organizations to access higher upload speeds and enable dual HD video feeds. It will be equipped with a unique scheduling system, providing the opportunity for clients to schedule satellite and fiber network reservations online, direct feeds to their selected destinations then access capacity using the automated functionality of the current QuickSPOT network. These new features of high upload speeds, ability to create MESH networks and a compact design are ideal for a mobile, automated network suited for broadcasters.
"Our mission is to provide our client’s with easy and efficient satellite network access,” On Call CEO Jim Gilbert said in a statement, aiming for the new network to take just moments to book satellite space online and access it using the auto-deploy system.

 

[Red]

C-COM Introduces Next-Gen Ka-Band FlyAway Antenna
March 20, 2013
C-COM Satellite Systems introduced the 75 cm iNetVu FLY-75V Antenna, the first of its next generation Ka-Band FlyAway Antennas, at the SATELLITE 2013 Exhibition March 19.
The new FlyAway antenna is designed to be easily transported in two rugged, lightweight cases and aims to provide commercial broadband Ka-satellite service users in North America and Europe with fully automated satellite acquisition. It aims to serve a number of Ka-market verticles requiring quick deployment by field people with minimal knowledge of antenna positioning such as Satellite News Gathering, disaster recovery, emergency services and other high bandwidth applications.
According to C-COM Satellite Systems CTO Bilal Awada, “the Fly-75V model is the first of a number of Ka Flyaway products to be introduced to the market shortly.” The new FlyAway platform aims to be flexible, lightweight and scalable to serve emerging Ka- services around the world.

 

[Red]

India Expected to be 'Booming' Market for UAVs
March 20, 2013

Advanced Defense Technologies (ADTI) has predicted India to be the "booming" market for micro- and mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for civilian and military use.

They attribute this prediction to the fact that surges in sales occur when UAVs become a common tool for not only the military, but civilians as well. ADTI predicts that the Indian marketplace will use these drones and UAVs for reconnaissance and mapping to surveillance, border or maritime patrol, and therefore expects these markets to grow steadily.

The defense industry consultant Teal Group recently named the UAV sector the fastest-growing sector in the aerospace industry. Global UAV sales are expected to double over the next decade, where current sales approximate to be around $6.6 billion annually.

According to ADTI President and CEO R.S. Tahim, the global drone and UAV market is becoming the greatest portion of aircraft sales worldwide. He also says that the UAV systems are often safer and cheaper than manned aircraft, causing an increase in the humanitarian, environment and agricultural sectors’ exploration of less controversial uses for UAVs.

 

[Red]

Movie Theaters to Begin Satellite Delivery by Summer 2013
March 20, 2013

The cinema coalition made up of AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount and Lionsgate announced last week that this summer they aim to commence satellite delivery of movies to theaters throughout the nation, with a full rollout by the end of 2013.

Satellite service aims to save money for studios. Already costs have decreased by due to the conversion of most North American theaters from 35mm to digital projection, allowing the shipping of movies encoded on hard drives to be one-tenth the cost of the shipping of film reels. Satellite will be designed to allow theaters to download movies form a private network onto dedicated servers, reducing distribution costs. However, satellite service is not projected to save money for ticketbuyers.

Groups not in the coalition such as smaller theaters, independent movie houses and indie-film distributors, are not as pleased with this transition, where the costs of digital conversion approximates to around $70,000 to $100,000 per screen.

Satellite transmission opens up the possibility to view more than just movies in the movie theater, such as popular series or a major sporting event.

 

[Red]

High-Throughput Clearly Dominates the SATELLITE 2013 Discussion
March 21, 2013
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.

 

[Red]

High-Throughput Clearly Dominates the SATELLITE 2013 Discussion
March 21, 2013
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.

 

[Red]

Hughes Drops Big News at SATELLITE 2013 with SSL Jupiter 2 Deal
March 21, 2013
Hughes Network Systems waited until the final day of SATELLITE 2013 to drop its biggest announcement of the year – the broadband satellite solutions and services provider selected SSL to build what will be the world’s highest capacity broadband satellite.
The Ka-band Jupiter 2/Echostar 19 satellite will have more than 150 Gbps throughput – 50 percent greater capacity than the Jupiter 1/EchoStar 17 satellite launched this past July – with a next-generation architecture having more than 120 spot beams, providing high quality Internet coverage across the U.S. and parts of Canada. Jupter 2 will launch in mid-2016, powering the growth of the company’s HughesNet service in North America for a service life of 15 years.
Hughes broke the news just as Via Satellite Editor Mark Holmes was leading a rapid-fire session at SATELLITE 2013, which featured Hughes Senior Vice President Mike Cook, who commented on the new deal with SSL. “Jupiter 2 will expand our international reach and supply of supplemental capacity,” he said. “When it comes to the size of this new spacecraft, I have no idea on the specifics. All I can say is that it’s big.”
The deal is just as significant for the recently rebranded SSL, who has been looking to leverage its recent merge with MDA to grow its North American business. “Hughes is the inventor of commercial VSATs and a pioneer in satellite broadband for the consumer market,” SSL President John Celli said in a statement. “Jupiter 2/EchoStar 19 will be the highest capacity broadband satellite ever built as a result of technology advances from both our companies and the excellent spirit of teamwork between our people.”
Hughes President Pradman Kaul said Jupiter 2 comes at the perfect time for the U.S.-based satellite broadband provider to capitalize on the growth of its HughesNet consumer service. “Speed and application demands are only going to increase as the online world expands into even more data- and media-rich experiences,” said Kaul. “Jupiter 2/EchoStar 19 will enable us to continue our leadership so that our customers can enjoy the Internet at its fullest. SSL is a trusted partner in building our platforms and we look forward to working with them again.”

 

[Red]

Planck's CMB Image Challenges Current Views of Universe
March 21, 2013

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the most precise map of the ancient universe ever made. The Planck space telescope constructed this 50 million pixels all-sky image of cosmic background radiation (CMB) by observing microwave radiation across the sky over 15 months from just the afterglow of the Big Bang. As a result, the data has suggested that the universe is 80 million years older than the previous guess, now estimated at 13.81 billion years old.

According to the map, the early universe appears to be asymmetrical, with an unexplained ‘cold spot’ over much of the sky. Also discovered is that the universe is made up of slightly more ordinary matter less dark energy than previously thought.

These large scale anomalies in data are not explained by standard universal models, suggesting that there is a preferred direction in the expansion of the universe called ‘Axis of Evil,’ and inspiring the search for a credible explanation.

 

[Red]

JetBlue Strives to Keep Basic Wi-Fi Free
March 21, 2013

JetBlue has revealed new details about its satellite-based Wi-Fi, as the airline is getting close to equipping its first aircraft with the service. JetBlue is marketing the internet as ‘Fly-Fi,’ which will be powered from ViaSat’s Ka-band-based Exede internet service.

The airline hopes to keep the basic service free, but plans to charge passengers when downloading a lot of data. According to JetBlue CCO Robin Hayes, JetBlue aims to charge passengers for premium Wi-Fi such as downloading movies, but is exploring the option to keep the basic service free potentially through partnerships and advertising.

Hayes also discusses that ViaSat’s Ka-band Wi-Fi service will offer much faster services than current competitor’s in-flight Wi-Fi such as Gogo and Row 44. JetBlue aims to use this Ka-band service to perform better than its competitors by allowing for every customer on the aircraft to utilize the Wi-Fe at the same time.

Hayes admits that in-flight Wi-Fi is crucial for JetBlue, as many business travelers will not tolerate a lack of internet connectivity for the duration of a transcontinental flight.