Coming off the heels of the 2012 Olympics in London, the DVB Forum, a standards body for the transmission industry, has launched a unified standard for Carrier ID. The launch is great news to the industry’s major satellite carriers, the broadcast community and industry groups that have rallied behind getting a viable technology deployed and standardized.

“Whether it’s one year, three years, or five years from now, it’s coming,” says Dick Tauber, vice president, transmission systems & new technology for the CNN News Group, of the technology becoming a given on all equipment.

Tauber is the broadcasting industry’s most visible satellite interference mitigation champion: he serves both as WBU-ISOG chairman and as co-chair for RFI-EUI, or Radio Frequency Interference – End User Initiative, a voluntary group founded in February 2011.

“We’ve been behind this from the beginning,” he says, adding, “We’re going to certainly support the adoption of Carrier ID as this process goes forward because we think in the long run, it will help us keep our programming secure and on the air.”

Vittoria Mignone, an R&D staff member with RAI – Radio Televisione Italiana, leads a task force on Carrier Identification in the S2 ad-hoc group, which is responsible of satellite technologies within the DVB Forum’s technical module — the final group that assesses a technology before it is standardized. She emphasizes that, while it is not a perfect solution for solving all radio frequency (RF) interference, Carrier ID will enable operators and users to quickly identify interfering carriers. The operator can even disable the Carrier ID in cases of need.

“The new standard will allow Carrier ID to be virtually compatible with all satellite carriers today and easy to be included in all satellite modulators,” she says.

Combating satellite interference – often caused by improperly configured equipment or failed equipment — has taken the industry by storm with unprecedented collaboration through industry groups.

 

Carrier ID Implemented at Summer Olympics

Three major FSS operators – Eutelsat, Intelsat and SES – successfully deployed two types of Carrier ID systems during the Summer Olympics — an existing version of Carrier ID in encoders, where the ID resides in the Network Information Table or NIT, and the more robust version from Comtech EF Data that has it in the modulator.

According to Martin Coleman, executive director of the Satellite Interference Reduction Group, approximately half of all satellite carriers at the Olympics used Carrier ID from day one. “We were not expecting such high numbers. To hit 50 percent on the first go was a good start, allowing for all the different types of equipment, different trucks, different uplinks that were being used. To our knowledge, we only had one customer affected by interference, which was managed.”

Mark Rawlins, head of service delivery for Eutelsat, adds that the proportion of transmissions with Carrier ID implemented was significant. “We had done a lot of work to prepare our systems so we could see Carrier ID in the satellite signals themselves.” Rawlins says the biggest impact of Carrier ID at the Games is that the DVB Forum is adopting a Carrier ID requirement in its standard. “I don’t believe that would have happened if we had not gone through this phase.”

Fortunately, interference was nearly non-existent during the Games. “We had no effect on our uplink feeds or any of our space segment used for the games,” observes Ron Busch, vice president, network engineering, Intelsat. “It was a great opportunity for the operators to work together and determine our process when these issues happen, and for the user community to see that we’re serious about using Carrier ID.”

“Carrier ID was up at the Olympics but no one detected it, and that’s exactly as it should have been,” adds Fred Morris, vice president, global sales engineering, for Comtech EF Data.

 

Users

The Games prompted significant interest in Carrier ID among users. “As much as possible, we addressed the biggest users of our capacity, and then awareness fed through to other users, who came to Eutelsat asking what was required to get Carrier ID,” recalls Rawlins.

Most of the carriers used the NIT version since it didn’t require newer technology and was already imbedded in a majority of encoders.

“Most people didn’t realize they even had Carrier ID,” says Coleman. “The encoder manufacturers had done such a good job with their encoders that many of the encoders had the ID on them and all they had to do was turn it on. For those who didn’t have Carrier ID, it was a free firmware upgrade from all the encoder manufacturers.”

Ericsson began deploying Carrier ID in all their encoders in 2010. According to Lisa Hobbs, head of broadcast compression solutions for Ericsson, the original Carrier ID specification was targeted toward satellite-news gathering activities. Ericsson has “hardwired” specific information into the NIT to be read, including the unit’s serial number and the name of the manufacturer, while the uplink provider on the ground can provide the GPS data and a contact number in case there is an interference problem. All the information is accessed from a website GUI, so “it’s very easy to get to the information; very easy to turn it on,” Hobbs says.

The plus side for the NIT version is it is easy and cheap to deploy. It also works on existing equipment as long as the equipment manufacturer is willing to update their code. The negative for NIT is that if a signal gets degraded it’s difficult or impossible to pull the ID out of the network information table. “If you send multiple encoders together and there was real interference, there was a likelihood you wouldn’t actually be able to lock onto the signal to read the NIT,” Hobbs says. “You would lose the information that was in NIT table.”

The Comtech spread-spectrum solution, on the other hand, has the Carrier ID in the modulator. It is at least 22 dB below the peak of the payload carrier to ensure that operators can always access the Carrier ID signal even when there is interference. That’s possible because the signal being detected is being spread within the band of the existing signal.

“You’ve got a tiny piece of data across a wide piece of bandwidth. Whatever you do –whether you introduce more noise or another carrier – whatever that interference is, that piece of spread spectrum is not affected because it’s already seen as part of the noise,” says Coleman.

He explains that spread spectrum is a very reliable RF technique that works well at very low levels when sending small amounts of data. “Carrier ID is a very small amount of data. It offers high reliability for detecting that signal even if there is other noise or other signals around it.”

Coleman finds it ironic that “we are causing a tiny bit of interference to solve interference.” He notes that one negative of the spread-spectrum solution is that it is a longer term implementation. At present, the average time it takes for a signal to be detected under all conditions is 10 to 15 seconds.

 

Investment in Technologies

An early adopter of Carrier ID technology, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has deployed both types of Carrier ID. It deployed a variant of Comtech’s offered by Newtec and Ericsson encoders when the broadcaster completed a major upgrade to DVB-S2 this summer. PBS today reaches 99 percent of television households through its 354 member TV stations in the United States.

“We are very excited about it,” says PBS chief technology officer John McCoskey. “We went live in June of this year and have been broadcasting our news signals over satellite with Carrier ID.” McCoskey’s particularly impressed with the speed of the Carrier ID recognition in the DVB signal. “It is very fast. If somebody is using a DVB-encoded television in their satellite broadcast and includes Carrier ID information, then you can very quickly identify who it is – literally within seconds get an ID.”

As soon as the standards are finalized, PBS will implement the modulator RF Carrier ID version as well, which “will take a little longer to decode, since it transmits at a lower information rate. But it will apply to satellite signals beyond just television transmissions. So folks who are using satellite for non-television transmission will still be tagging their carriers with the RF technology,” McCoskey says.

 

Spread Spectrum Standard

The Comtech EF Data solution is the foundation of the new standard. Mignone confirms that the new standard will be based on the “superimposition of a Spread Spectrum MetaCarrier to the main Data Carrier.” The message transported by the MetaCarrier will include at a minimum, the MAC address of the equipment and the Carrier ID format version to allow for future extensions and improvements.

“The MetaCarrier technology is much better – we’ve done extensive testing because it’s actually a spread spectrum type carrier. You have two carriers on top of each other and you can still pull the ID out,” Busch adds.

Tauber agrees, pointing out that the solution doesn’t require one provider to stop transmitting in order to recognize the origin of an interfering signal. He notes that a modulator-based solution has additional advantages. “There are a lot fewer modulator manufacturers to deal with –so it will be easier to implement,” he says.

Selecting a Carrier ID standard “puts a very, very big stake in the ground,” says Coleman. “We’ve got a great solution — a proper technical solution for a real ID that will carry us forward for at least the next two decades.”

For Carrier ID to work, the industry needs a common database – a likely provider would be the Space Data Association – that will securely maintain and administer all of the Carrier ID codes and corresponding operators that carry a signal.

“Combating RF interference is one of the key tenants on which the SDA was founded. Therefore, the hosting of the Carrier ID codes is a natural fit for our Space Data Center (SDC). We look forward to continuing discussions with the organizations promoting the use of Carrier ID,” says Toby Nassif, SDA chairman and executive director, who serves as Intelsat’s vice president, satellite operations and engineering.

Hobbs says deciding on a standard is only half of the battle. “One of the things I have been saying for the last three years, you can develop all the standards you want, but once it requires real development effort to implement, there has to be a demand from the customer base for the manufacturers to comply. That’s still what we are missing – the drive for this is coming from the operators, but they are not necessarily the ones buying the equipment. We need the end users to start asking for it.”

 

Best Course Forward

Many agree that the broadcasting community will be the first to adopt Carrier ID, but another important group of users, VSAT operators, will require a different technology solution and more data before they move forward.

“To come out with a standard for VSAT providers is difficult,” admits Busch, noting that the industry relies on minimal overhead in their transmission systems, while trying to keep their prices down and their equipment as small as possible. “Once we show that this can work – and maybe even if it’s an external device that wouldn’t affect their overhead – we can move forward.”

“VSATs are a different animal – they need a new technology,” says Coleman, who contends that there is a much greater cost penalty with deploying Carrier ID given the number of VSATs on the market. Busch adds that VSAT operators rely on technology that is inherently difficult to track. “When you think of TDMA – it’s bursting. One burst is not a long enough time period for any type of detection system to pull the ID. Doing Carrier ID for broadcasting is much easier.”

The VSAT community first engaged in the Carrier ID conversation a decade ago, says David Hartshorn, secretary general, Global VSAT Forum. “Carrier ID is very exciting and we have been facilitating the effort on both the VSAT and the broadcasting side,” he says.

Prevention

With Carrier ID successfully employed in the Olympics, operators are next seeking to deploy the technology at three events on three different continents — the 2014 World Cup, the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. “We proved it could be done. We must keep that momentum going on all fronts — training, quality assurance, Carrier ID and others,” Coleman says.

“Carrier ID is not a silver bullet and it is not going to solve the problem completely,” says Rawlins, noting that preventive efforts are also critical.

Eutelsat’s own training efforts, which have been developed in coordination with the GVF Certification Program, have helped more than 8,000 installers learn techniques to accurately set up transmit-and-receive antennas. But, when interference occurs, Carrier ID gives operators a quicker means to address it. “It should save us a significant amount of time,” says Rawlins, estimating that the technology in most situations can resolve interference in minutes compared with an hour or longer.

Without question, many countries and operators are showing strong interest in Carrier ID, installation training, product approvals, and other interference-prevention measures. Every major satellite conference includes planned sessions related to satellite interference and its mitigation by the industry. For instance, the Asia Pacific Satellite Communications Council held in Korea in September included a four-hour interference session. Looking forward, operators agree they must continue their progress in getting Carrier ID adopted while improving their own internal processes to quickly identify and resolve interference. “We need to use the momentum in place already and keep it going forward,” says Rawlins. Busch agrees, saying that the industry goal to fully implement Carrier ID by January 1, 2015 is realistic.

“I think it will happen,” adds McCoskey. “It will certainly happen first with the broadcasters because the numbers are smaller and the interest is very high at this point. Everyone will benefit as more and more broadcasters implement Carrier ID in their satellite broadcasts.”