Satellite IP

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1

This is admittedly a touch end-usery, my apologies...

I'm looking into satellite-based 2-way IP transport, on the scale of
SCPC DVB-RCS or iDirect, as an adjunct to the already installed
"traditional" one-way satellite gear installed in the Frontline DSNG
truck owned by my new employer, both for MPEG streaming for broadcast,
and possibly for emergency-response support, if I can sell that idea.

Has anyone on NANOG any personal experience with that, from either end?

Almost all of what I'll need to do will be what the satellite guys call
"occasional use", ie: "I need a six hour block Thursday night, starting
at 7pm", as opposed to the "monthly service with an FAP" that most
people seem to sell. LBiSat is one company that understands occasional,
I'm wondering if there are others (and if their IP jocks hang out here).

Cheers,
-- jra

2

What happens if the bird is already fully booked for 9PM to midnight?

3

I'm looking into satellite-based 2-way IP transport, on the scale of
SCPC DVB-RCS or iDirect, as an adjunct to the already installed
"traditional" one-way satellite gear installed in the Frontline DSNG
truck owned by my new employer, both for MPEG streaming for broadcast,
and possibly for emergency-response support, if I can sell that idea.

Has anyone on NANOG any personal experience with that, from either end?

I have some experience with what you are asking. While not from the DSNG side, I have experience with satellite based IP using iDirect Infinity shared satellite hubs. The 5000- and 7000-series Infinity remotes will support SCPC between two remotes if you wish, but it's all IP based.

Getting into the emergency response arena would require an IP based network. I have done this with the City of Chicago for several communications trucks that my former employer built and maintains for them. They send and receive live video, VoIP, and enterprise network data across the satellite. They have a dedicated space segment that they buy annually so they don't run into the issue of not having satellite connectivity available when they really need it. Trying to sell this together to your employer possibly means a merging of your two disparate capabilities. Can you move your MPEG streams over IP?

Almost all of what I'll need to do will be what the satellite guys call
"occasional use", ie: "I need a six hour block Thursday night, starting
at 7pm", as opposed to the "monthly service with an FAP" that most
people seem to sell. LBiSat is one company that understands occasional,
I'm wondering if there are others (and if their IP jocks hang out here).

Intelsat operates several iDirect hubs available for public use which are tied to the Internet. They should be able to help you with your occasional use needs. If you need a contact, I can try to dig one up for you.

Ryan Wilkins

4

OK - I'll feed the troll. What's the proper amount of unused and therefor
non-revenue-generating capacity the operator is supposed to reserve in order to
*guarantee* that bandwidth will be available?

(Hint - the provider doesn't have to be "outrageously" oversubscribed - by
definition, if you're oversubscribed *at all*, it's possible for somebody to
lose out. It's easy for the provider to be 98% sure that they'll be able to
satisfy all the requests. But guaranteeing 100% is a whole nother story...)

5

Ok, I'll feed the troll. :slight_smile:

Those who want to *guarantee* that they will never lose out -- people
like network news organizations -- *lease entire transponders by the year,
or for the projected lifetime of the satellite*, after which those 36MHz
are yours to do with as you like; here's a list of the current *dedicated*
ABC transponder avails:

   http://www.abcnewsabsat.com/files/frequencies_nac_041510[2].pdf

There's really a *lot* of space-segment available, Valdis. A lot.

And if you buy a transponder for the entire projected 15-year lifetime
of the bird, I hear you get a pretty hefty discount over the hourly
rack rate. :wink:

Now, in my particular case, the secondary usage I was talking about
wasn't so much first-line municipal support per se, but backup to that,
in the way that hams have always provided that sort of support, just fancier;
in that case, it's practical for me to utilize contended, and therefore
substantially cheaper, occasional time (LBiSat, for example, has quoted
me $179/hr for 3MHz, and $250/hr for 4.5MHz as a rack rate, which is
acceptable for my primary use, as long as the uncontended-service
packet-loss and jitter numbers are low enough; contended time should be
much cheaper than that), and in either use case, since there are at least
3 providers, with a total of something like 12 full transponders, who
provide occasional iDirect connectivity, I shouldbe able to book the
time *somewhere*, just as "traditional" DSNG operators
(using DVB-S MPEG2, mostly) always have.

Thanks to Kelly, I'd seen Skycasters, but didn't get the impression from
the website that they did anything other than monthly service; to James,
I'll check out Trustcomm; and to Ryan: yeah, there are Video-to-MPEG-to-
IP-Ethernet encoders off the rack; for that use-case, I mostly need to find
a matched pair that's efficient; the primary use of the truck will *not*
be sports. :slight_smile:

And I'll be leaving in the DVB-S modulator that's there, so if the truck
is suitable to someone for rental, they'll be able to use it in the traditional
fashion as well.

My motivation for asking the question *here* was of course to get the operator
perspective on the actual transport, if anyone had any.

Cheers,
-- jra

6

I helped a radio station put together a remote trailer using a mobile satellite system back in 2004; SDN was the provider. Bandwidth we had available was I believe 1.5MB down and 384K up, burstable to 512K IIRC. Mobile satellite operations is a trip, especially with the 4 watt uplink transmitter required at the time for the wide uplink bandwidth.

For the target use, UDP video and audio streaming, it worked very well once the system linked up; satellite acquisition and clearance for uplink transmitter RF turnon was typically a half an hour or so. When using TCP, however, the latency was noticeable. Once the stream started and slow-start finished the bandwidth was what you'd expect from a terrestrial circuit, but slow-start was really slow, thanks to the propagation time to and from geosync orbit.

These systems had great use for VoIP PBX trunks for setting up a field phone system; the IP phone 'extensions' connected with WiFi, and the PBX itself was in the trailer, with the PBX to outside trunks handled by the satellite link.

The system was decommissioned just this past year due to the uplink bandwidth cost, the intermittent system use, and the penetration of G3 data services in the area.