Rendition of Telesat’s Phase 1 LEO satellite in orbit. Photo: SSTL

Speedcast has completed testing on Telesat’s phase one Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite for Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras. 

Over nine tests, Speedcast measured throughput, latency, packet loss, and jitter across applications including videoconferencing, video streaming, web browsing, file transfer, voice and remote desktop. Results showed latencies of about 35 ms, which is in line with projects for the final Telesat Lightspeed network design. Petrobras provided the data to represent the company’s typical data, voice, and video applications. 

Speedcast reported that the Ka-band link tests demonstrated latency, data rates and application performance equivalent to a fiber-connected office environment — that LEO can be a viable option for its oil and gas customers. For an oil and gas Speedcast customer like Petrobras, this could enable use of enterprise resource planning systems, which are not possible via Geostationary (GEO) satellite because of latency needs. 

“LEO will be another technology that Speedcast leverages to design complete managed solutions that deliver the high quality of service our customers require for their critical operations around the world,” said Will Mudge, vice president of Engineering Operations at Speedcast.