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Cisco Partners with DOD, Intelsat for Space-Based IP Routing.
Cisco, the Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelsat General Corp. reached an agreement with the launch of the Intelsat 14 (IS-14) satellite, which contains an Internet router that is able to operate in space.
The router onboard IS-14 is intended to demonstrate Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) capabilities to the military.
Conventional satellite services typically deliver physical layer capacity akin to a leased line in the sky. The latency induced by the 44,600 mile round-trip path for geosynchronous satellites, however, reduces the throughput of TCP/IP-based applications, which includes the bulk of Internet traffic. The theoretical download speed of a Web page tops out according to the latency even if bandwidth and other network resources are plentiful.
Satellite networks are often deployed in a hub-and-spoke configuration where traffic from a remote site passes through a fixed teleport earth station, or hub. If the traffic is then redirected back to another remote site in the same network, a double satellite hop occurs and the round-trip latency doubles to roughly one second, exacerbating the throughput issue.
IRIS can mitigate such effects by removing the double hop and, more importantly, improve the delivery reliability.
About Intelsat.
Intelsat is the leading provider of fixed satellite services worldwide. Since its founding in 1964, Intelsat has provided transmission services for milestone events, including the global delivery of video signals of the first moonwalk, providing the “hot line” connecting the White House and the Kremlin and transmitting live television coverage of every Olympics since 1968.
Intelsat has one of the largest, most flexible and most reliable satellite fleets in the world, covering over 99% of the world’s population. Intelsat operates more than approximately 50 satellites with a fully integrated satellite operations model that features two operations centers connected by redundant fiber, resulting in a robust monitoring and control system that is unrivaled in the industry. A terrestrial network of teleports, points of presence and leased fiber links that Intelsat uses to carry traffic and provide satellite access for its customers, complements its satellite fleet.