By Jason Bates

Signal interference is a costly and growing problem for the satellite industry, but companies have had difficulties in collecting concrete numbers that portray the scope of the problem. A group of satellite operators and other industry players have launched an effort to document interference issues, which they hope will spur the industry to cooperate more on developing a solution.

Signal interference has been an issue for the satellite industry for decades, but individual incidents rarely garner much attention, as the majority rarely last long enough to be a concern. But the number and frequency of incidents is growing and posing a larger threat to the overall economic health of the satellite industry, officials say.

The increase in satellite use as well as the drive by network operators to cut costs is contributing to the rise in interference incidents, says Robert Ames, president of the Satellite Users Interference Reduction Group (SUIRG). "The problem 10 years ago was serious, but you could deal with it," he says. "There were enough resources available in the sky that you could reassign customers to other locations on the satellite. The causes were of little concern for the user. But with the sheer increase of services through satellite, it has become a bigger problem."

First Step: Admitting There Is A Problem

Efforts to better address the interference issue have been held up because large segments of the satellite industry either do not understand the problem or how serious it is becoming, officials say. "I don’t know if people are more aware of the problem or if its more of an issue," says Robert Bell, executive director of the World Teleport Association. "The major operators are the ones that handle the costs and deal with the customers who get upset when there is an interference issue, but there is only so much they can do because the interference comes from people uplinking to their birds."

SUIRG, which claims all of the major satellite operators as well as several equipment manufacturers among its members, has launched an effort to quantify the effects of interference across the industry for the first time and promote better ways to fight the problem, Ames says. "After about 10 years of getting together on a semi-annual basis and sitting around and complaining about interference and not doing anything about it, we realized we had to do something about it or disband," he adds.

SUIRG launched an effort in September to collect data, when members who encounter an interference problem asked to enter the relevant information into a SUIRG database. The effort will help develop a baseline level for interference problems, allowing the industry to track whether the issue is becoming better or worse, Ames says. "This shows us where it is coming from in greater detail so we can then focus all our efforts on the real causes of interference," he adds. "It also gives us a trend to see if we’re doing any good."

The early trends, covering 3,650 reported incidents since the launch of the database, indicate that the major causes of the identifiable interference problems are human error; cross-polarization of signals, usually due to lack of proper training; and equipment problems. These three areas account for 62 percent of all interference cases combined, according to the SUIRG data. Another 34 percent of interference incidents are caused by unknown sources, usually because the problems appear and disappear before the operators have a chance to document it, Ames says.

"When you see the numbers they are fairly large," says Mark Morgan, director of customer operations for Loral Skynet and former chair of SUIRG’s Interference Costs working group. "If coordination between the operators is not done properly that can mean reduced power available for transponders, which means you can’t sell them for full value."

Dealing with incidents of interference costs the major satellite operator millions of dollars a year, but the industry has not been able to place a specific number on the damage, Ames says. There are individual examples, such as an unnamed company that had a $110 million contract held up for two months due to interference, costing the operator $750,000 in revenue. Another company lost $3.5 million in revenue in a year because it had to operate some of its transponders in reduced power modes to mitigate the effects of interference, he says.

There are also costs in fighting interference, such as manpower expenses that can exceed $500,000 per year and the costs of identification and location systems, which can run from $20,000 to $30,000 per year for pay-as-you-go services to $500,000 for a company to purchase its own system, Ames says. This extra expense is reflected in transponder sale and lease prices.

Interference can also cause major financial problems for users of satellite services, says Maury Mechanick, counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of White and Case LLP and a former senior executive with Comsat Corp. and Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications. "If a case of interference interrupts credit card work for a bank, the economic impact can reach several million dollars," he says. "The real-world magnitude goes beyond satellite economics itself. It can have a larger scale impact. If satellites are seen as somewhat less reliable due to interference, it can cause major customers to look for other alternatives, which would be very harmful and very damaging to the industry."

Price of Success

The increase in the amount and severity of interference incidents can be traced back to the success of the industry itself, officials say. In the early days of the commercial satellite industry, fewer satellites and fewer customers meant that cases of interference were few and far between and the consequences usually were not as severe, Mechanick says.

"The industry is trying to do more things with either fewer or finite resources," Mechanick adds. "Today, there is an extraordinarily congested orbital arc and technology is pushing applications in the direction of smaller and smaller dishes on the ground that are being used for two-way communications. The greater use being made of satellites calls for greater precision for all the equipment operating with the satellite. Those two things combine to make interference a much more frequent occurrence and much more serious when it happens."

Human error, which can usually be attributed to lack of concentration by the network operators or lack of training and experience, is among the biggest sources of interference, says Bob Crawford, vice president of network operations for Panamsat Corp. "The qualifications of the engineers started to decrease," he says. "Then you got into unmanned earth stations with [very small aperture terminal] operations and then direct-to-home-type operations. You can draw a graph. As the number of systems come online, either not manned or with less qualified engineers, the interference curve grows."

Cost pressures are causing customers to push the limits of their network operations, says Crawford. Many customers request more powerful networks that would be less likely to fall victim to interference–until they see the prices. Then they fall back to channels that provide the least amount of megabits that cover their requirements. "There is very little headroom left, and the channels are unable to sustain even small amounts of interference," he adds.

Luis Jimenez is the supervisor at SES Americom’s Woodbine, Md.-based satellite control center, which flies 10 satellites and is responsible for more than 130 customers and several hundred transponders. "Interference is as bad as it has ever been for the past few years," he says. "I know the satellite industry has had tough times, but it continues to grow and I have customers adding sites and earth stations. The more users on the spectrum, the more chances for interference; not only for the numbers, but also because of the business pressures, quality of the equipment, speed at which you have to come to market and so forth. Those all contribute to a less-than-ideal operating environment."

Even the satellite operators themselves can fall victim to the constant push, Jimenez says. "There is a lot of business pressure and human pressure," he says. "You have to install so many sites quickly for so many customers, even the installation process might be lacking. Maybe we didn’t tighten cable as we should have or ground or shield a cable as we should have."

Technical Solutions

By default, it is the responsibility of the major satellite operators to combat the problem, Crawford says. "It’s up to the operators to resolve it whether it’s their fault or not," he says. "We have customers that get very upset and we understand the issue. For people like HBO and Viacom, even a few seconds of outage can be huge issue for them, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars."

That financial pressures helped create a market for technology that detects the presence of interference and locates the sources. While the technology was mainly an outgrowth of military need, the commercial industry has embraced it, with Panamsat spending around $10 million on such technology throughout the past four years, Crawford says.

Glowlink Communications Technology Inc. provides systems that detect and classify interference in the satellite signals. The company currently is deploying a global monitoring system for Panamsat that will use 15 sites around the world to monitor all the company’s traffic for interference, says Jeffrey Chu, president of Glowlink. But many commercial operators are not willing to invest in the latest detection equipment, he says.

"The military has been aware of the problem and wants to deal with it," Chu says. "The commercial world is aware of it, but they haven’t been wiling to invest as much. The people you talk to on the satellite operator side are not very high up in terms of making the buying decisions. But the commercial guys are getting there, and Panamsat, as usual, is the more innovative and forward looking one."

Once interference is detected, companies such as Herndon, Va.-based Transmitter Locations Systems LLC (TLS) provide the means to locate the source of the problem. Panamsat purchased the first TLS system and today, TLS has 19 geolocation systems in use around the globe, says Dennis Fecteau, the company’s president and chairman.

Once interference is detected, the TLS system can narrow down the source of the offending signal within a few kilometers, Fecteau adds. He estimates that TLS has helped various companies resolve about 10,000 cases of interference, and 95 percent of the incidents were accidental.

TLS’s main rival in the market is U.K.-based Qinetiq, which was started in the early 1980s by the Ministry of Defense and privatized in 2001. By that time, TLS already had locked up the commercial market, so Qinetiq opted to develop a service model that would allow satellite operators to spend less money in protecting their signals by only paying for the technology when they actually use it, says Qinetiq’s Nigel Smith.

The company’s business comes primarily from operators in Southeast Asia that use Qinetiq’s operation in Singapore, Smith says. Operators contact Qinetiq when they suspect a problem and Qinetiq’s employees can usually locate the source of the interfering signal within 10 kilometers, and sometimes as close as a kilometer, he says. There also is a detection site in the United Kingdom and Smith estimates it would take about eight stations to cover all the areas where the service is needed.

"We are trying to minimize the investment and get people to sign up for longer term commitments," Smith says. "It’s fair to say that more and more people that use satellite are aware of the technology and are asking for service providers to have it available to them."

Increased Cooperation

While the detection and location technology continues to improve, officials agree that the only way to reduce the interference problem long term is through increased cooperation among satellite operators and their customers. "You’ve got highly complex systems for locating the interference, but they are not a panacea," says Stewart Sanders, vice president of space segment operations for New Skies. "They cannot resolve all interference. The single most important thing is to put in place standards that all people who are going to access the network are going to follow so they minimize the interference."

The need for cooperation among satellite operators will become even more evident as idle transponders begin to be filled, Morgan says. "If one operator is not adhering to the rules, it can have an impact on another operator," Morgan says. "We continue to have problems that have stopped us from generating revenue on some transponders. As long as we have extra transponders it doesn’t actually take money, but it does impede our potential future sells."

One of the key areas SUIRG members would like the industry to concentrate on is training for operators on items such as VSATs, satellite news trucks and other equipment used to send signals to the satellites, Ames says. "Customers themselves felt that a lack of training or attention to detail by the uplink operators is a key factor," he adds. "They would like to see some sort of a process set up like a qualification system for operators."

SUIRG also has developed a database of companies that have proven they can provide interference-free uplink services, Ames says. The list is intended to offer customers a measure of confidence when searching for uplink services, and a company can be removed from the list if they are proven to be the source of three or more interference incidents without taking corrective action, he adds.

SUIRG also would like to implement an industry-wide system that would involve placing an identifier within the signals passing through the satellites to make it easier to locate any sources of interference, Ames says. The equipment makers have indicated that such a marker could be implemented but have says they will not take the steps unless required by the operators buying the equipment.

"The emphasis needs to be on safe operations," Jimenez says. "It has been neglected for too long. SUIRG has been trying to get the word out, but SUIRG is only as good as the time its members have to perform any work."

Jason Bates is the Assistant Editor of Via Satellite magazine.