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Commercial satellite broadcasts have been impacted by recent, politically motivated signal jamming.
Image credit: BBC
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[Satellite TODAY 06-26-13] While the majority of satellite signal interference is unintentional, politically motivated jamming incidents continue to surface, according to David Hartshorn, secretary general, GVF.
During the Arab Spring and other periods of political instability, “we’ve been seeing a flare up of intentional interference," he said, but noted that over the past few months, instances have started to decline.
While Eutelsat officials declined to comment on the specific number of incidents, they agreed with GVF. “In terms of deliberate interference, we have recorded an increase of incidents since 2009, which peaked in the last part of 2012, said Mark Rawlins head of payload engineering and operations at Eutelsat. He also agrees with Hartshorn in that, in the past few months “there’s been a marked decline,” Rawlins said.
Ron Busch, vice president of network engineering at Intelsat, said the company has been fortunate not to have any cases of intentional interference over the past two years. And, while Eutelsat and other operators are contending with intentional interference, SES has so far been spared too. “What we have experienced so far was interference do to faulty equipment or human mistakes,” Yves Feltes, spokesman for SES said.
But officials from GVF, Intelsat and Eutelsat said the number of intentional interference incidents over the past few years is significant and has far reaching effects, felt well beyond the military and intelligence community and reaching into the broadcast journalism sector. According to Hartshorn, broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and The Voice of America have been noticing a jamming signal capable of blocking or eliminating their broadcast transmissions in certain markets.
"Having reached the point where this is no longer tolerable, the BBC in London held a meeting last fall and invited representatives of national administrators and satellite industry reps for an agenda addressing what to do about intentional interference," Hartshorn said.
While sometimes the issue can easily be remedied by moving the broadcast to a different transponder, some cases prove to be more difficult. "Satellite operators can’t always track the interference, and sometimes even when they do track it using geolocation technology, the interfering source may be identified but it doesn’t come with a phone number," Hartshorn said.
Companies such as SATcorp and Glowlink make it their business to identify the source of interference. In Eutelsat’s well-documented case, Eutelsat has detected geolocalized interference from Iran and notified the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), whichserves as the United Nations (UN)’s specialized agency for information and communications technology.
Geolocation is a key tool that allows operators to identify the sources of all type of interference, according to Martin Coleman, executive director, Satellite Interference Reduction Group (IRG). “For intentional interference it can often be the only way of determining the source, as they are naturally unlikely to use Carrier ID. By improving geolocation technologies, we can locate the source much more efficiently, as well as becoming more accurate, helping us to pinpoint a much more precise location," he told SatelliteTODAY.com in a previous article.
In order to better handle interference, the IRG has made significant progress over the last year, including outlining three goals to achieve within the next year. "We want to see both Network Information Table (NIT) Carrier ID and the new Carrier ID technology implemented for 50 percent of all video carriers. We [also] want the industry to supply standardized geolocation reports with a view to starting the process to migrate to an ISO standard. Finally, we want to establish the root causes of common VSAT interference problems and work with manufacturers to start to rectify them with new systems rolled out. These technologies together will make a significant impact on all types of interference situations," Coleman said.
Be sure to check out PART II – How operators are combating interference challenges.
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