Intelsat at ITW 2009 - Satellite Seminars

Hello All,

This is Chris Hudson, Director of Engineering for Product Strategy and Development, blogging on Intelsat's Satellite Seminars at ITW 2009.

Yesterday, I attended the Satellite Seminar moderated by Jay Yass (pictured below), Intelsat’s Vice President of Network Services, titled "The Satellite Component of Pan-regional Data Networks." This was a well rounded panel with two network providers (Bell Canada, Verizon Business), one hardware manufacturer (iDirect) and one end-user (The World Bank). All either provide or integrate into "hybrid" terrestrial plus satellite data networks.

The consensus is that we in the satellite industry shouldn't separate ourselves with the "hybrid" moniker. We are providing a solution, period. As Verizon stated, "satellite is just another access like DSL or Frame Relay" into their private backhaul network. The QoS and SLAs provided are mapped to the satellite segment, if one exists. For The World Bank and others, the quality (or non-existence) of the "local loop" or last mile determines if a satellite is used.

Satellite provides great availability and true path diversity for business continuity.

Bell Canada's sampling of 100 terrestrial sites revealed an average of 6-7 outages per month or approximately 80 per year (counting outages greater than 10 minutes). The same metric for satellite-based sites was 2 per year! You go, satellite!

Earlier yesterday, I sat in on George G's (so much easier and faster than spelling out G-i-a-g-t-z-o-g-l-o-u-'s) panel, "The Future of Wireless Backhaul." George is Intelsat's Vice President, Corporate & Marketing Strategy. It also was a well rounded panel with two cellular hardware manufacturers (Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens), one VSAT manufacturer (Hughes Network Systems), and two cellular backhaul network operators (Gateway Communications and Digicel).

• Gateway backhauls 2.5 billion yes, billion, minutes a year in 19 countries, of which 15 are in Africa.
• Digicel runs networks in 31 countries: 26 in Latin America/Caribbean and five in the Pacific.

The panel focused on reaching the 'last billion' of the world's 6.2 billion inhabitants who do not have a cell phone.

• 80% have coverage but not a phone. 20%, or 200 million, have no coverage. A defining feature of this billion is that cellular is worth it - affordable at only $2-$3 per month.

A survey of the panelists revealed that the keys to achieving this are:

• everything must use IP transport, which is much more efficient than TDM (e.g. E-1s),
• reduce the remote site CapEx and OpEx costs via lower power consumption devices, standards-based (i.e. high volume) hardware, and sharing of infrastructure among multiple operators, and
• reduce the satellite bandwidth via intelligent optimization (compression, local switching, voice codecs), bandwidth sharing (TDMA, DAMA), and higher throughputs per MHz.

By the way, 2.5 billion minutes per year means 5,000 simultaneous calls every minute of every day!

~Chris Hudson, Director of Engineering for Product Strategy and Development, Intelsat