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ViaSat gives war effort a boost
Airplanes passing silently over enemy territory in Iraq and Afghanistan record and transmit videos in real time back to intelligence experts in the United States with the help of Carlsbad satellite communications company ViaSat.
Because those videos help inform military decisions, picture quality is extremely important, said Larry Taylor, the head of Government Satellite Communications Systems at the company.
To boost the resolution and speed of these videos, ViaSat recently doubled the data rate its equipment can transmit, from 512 to 1024 kilobytes. This upgrade was made at the request of the Department of Defense, one of the company’s biggest customers, Taylor said.
The company also recently improved military planes’ ability to send data back to the ground.
“Traditionally when we think of Internet access, we think about a simple mouse-click to load a complex Web page, which is a lot of data going out to a remote facility, but very little coming back,” Taylor said. “But with the Department of Defense, they are actually creating the data as videos or other intelligence information collected on an airplane, and that information has to be relayed to analysis centers on the ground.”
Giving an airplane a wireless connection is like hitting a moving target, because the plane’s antennas are never in the same place. ViaSat accomplishes this task with a network of 13 hubs on the ground connected to 13 satellites, which create a “worldwide footprint” of wireless connection, Taylor said.
Boosting the planes’ data speed will allow them to send videos with higher resolution and more frames per second, both of which are important for military intelligence activities, Taylor said. Greater resolution means the video’s screen can be enlarged without creating a pixilated, or blurry, image, and increasing a video’s frames makes it smoother.
Although ViaSat originally only supplied its satellite connection technology to commercial vehicles, including business jets and trains, the Department of Defense asked the company to adapt its technology to military airplanes.
ViaSat’s satellite antenna and software are installed in more than 100 military aircraft and more than 100 business aircraft, Taylor said. The company is also expanding its reach into boats, and plans to have software in more than 750 maritime craft soon.
The average cost to equip military planes with the antenna and software to transmit videos is about $350,000, and ViaSat also has government contracts to work on upgrading the planes, he said. The company brings in about $50 million a year between its commercial and military customers, but Taylor said that number is expected to grow.
The company’s data rate from the air to the ground is also expected to grow to 2 megabytes “and beyond,” he said. It plans to transition to higher frequency bands and launch a new satellite next year.
BusinessCom Launches Evolution VSAT Services
BusinessCom, a global satellite Internet service provider, has launched iDirect Evolution enabled satellite Internet access services on the Loral Skynet Telstar-11N and the newly launched SES WORLD SKIES NSS-12 geostationary satellites. The new Evolution services are available on Ku-Band beams covering the Middle East, Iraq and many other countries. The new Evolution based services allow customers to enjoy always-on 24/7 broadband satellite Internet access with only a small 1.2m VSAT antenna and 3W block up-converters.
The iDirect Evolution platform selected by BusinessCom is an ideal choice for multi-service broadband satellite Internet access. The Evolution X3 modem is based on the DVB-S2 standard that delivers very high spectrum efficiency, and is backed up by ACM (Adaptive Coding and Modulation) technology.
The ACM automatically changes the outbound modulation and FEC overhead per each remote VSAT terminal on the fly, depending on the actual rain fade margins observed, allowing Evolution VSAT terminals to stay in the network even during heavy rainfalls. The return channel is based on a patented iDirect Deterministic TDMA technology that enables true QoS (Quality of Service) support.
The primary markets for the newly launched services, which complement BusinessCom’s flagmanship PEP-iDirect solution, are demanding DTH and SOHO users, Internet cafes, SCADA and telemetry applications, and small to medium-sized Wireless Hot Spots. Because the Ku-Band Evolution X3 satellite based equipment is much more affordable than the C-Band PEP-iDirect VSAT kits, BusinessCom quality service just got one step closer to a consumer market.
With a built-in Ethernet interface, additional key features of the newly launched BusinessCom VSAT services include support for a rich set of IP protocols (including both TCP and UDP), multicasting, DHCP and NAT, built-in TCP and HTTP acceleration, advanced QoS and traffic prioritization and seamless terrestrial integration.
BusinessCom Launches DVB-S2 and SCPC IO Satellite Internet Service
BusinessCom, a global satellite telecommunications service provider, has launched the Advantage IP VSAT service, based on Ku-band IO satellites, providing coverage to more than 18 countries in the Middle East and parts of CIS and Asia, including Iraq and Afghanistan. With the new SLA-enabled service primarily designed to provide IP backbone connectivity for Internet Service Providers and Enterprise customers, BusinessCom has introduced satellite Internet access to these regions at unprecedented pricing.
The new BusinessCom Advantage IP VSAT service is based on the DVB-S2 standard, with ACM (Adaptive Coding and Modulation) delivering up to 52 Mbps IP throughput per terminal, with the ability to bond multiple terminals together. Whenever high order modulation can be used, the throughput can be further increased up to 133 Mbps per terminal. The Advantage IP VSAT service is available in both bi-directional receive and transmit and receive-only configurations, seamlessly integrating with existing terrestrial IP uplinks.
The Advantage IP VSAT customer premise equipment (CPE) kit features an easy-to-install motorized antenna, with a relatively small footprint compared to traditional IO satellite tracking hardware. The system automatically aligns and stays aligned to the target satellite, without the need to deploy, and possibly redeploy, a licensed installer. The CPE is designed to provide single button satellite acquisition and automatic reacquisition in the harshest of environments, minimizing initial deployment and recurring maintenance expenditures.
The Advantage IP VSAT CPE also includes a high performance Layer 7 Firewall appliance that provides QoS, Network Intrusion Detection System, Remote Administration, caching and on the fly traffic compression capabilities. This significantly increases satellite bandwidth efficiency compared to traditional VSAT systems. By leveraging the IP bandwidth optimization and IO satellite pricing, the Advantage IP VSAT is a very high performance, dedicated satellite Internet access solution.