[Satellite News 07-27-08] The big question for optimizing satellite technology is how to speed up the uplink. The good news is that the technology to dramatically increase the speed of the uplink is more than a decade old and some just may not realize it.
    “In terms of the data rate transfer, we were building satellite networks 10 years ago that the commercial industry in the U.S. probably wont see in another 10 years,” said Dave Beering, managing director of Morgan Franklin, who cut his teeth in the industry working on high-performance satellite networks as far back as 1994. Beering’s team — which he calls his “Corp of Innovation” — formed in 1994 at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and consists of five engineers that have worked together for almost 11 years on close to 60 different projects. He’s worked on everything from Ka-band to the ATM Research and Industrial Enterprise Study (ARIES).
    “The very first satellite link I ever worked on was a T1 link off of an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 1994,” Beering said. “At that time, I was at Amaco Corporation and NASA was a partner of ours in a huge project called ARIES. We built a very large broadband terrestrial network that was designed to look at packet-based technologies, virtual networks, collaborative supercomputing
and visualization. It turns out that the satellite link we were working on was the very first ATM cell ever delivered over satellite link.”
    In 1997, Beering and his team delivered a terabyte of data via satellite to the floor of a San Jose supercomputing show. “It was called the Terabyte Challenge and a lot of people didn’t think we could do it, including people from NASA. They said it wasn’t possible,” he said. “The focus of my team’s work back in 1997 was TCP/IP acceleration using native capabilities and standards on conventional platforms. What we did during the challenge was work with Sun Microsystems to get a version of TCP/IP optimization built into Solaris’ operating system. We had four different hosts delivering data across an OC12 link in real time until the data iterated. The data was transmitting from tape drive to tape drive on two opposite ends of the showroom floor.
    “It was funny, there was this shrink-wrapped software running on the Solaris host. We grabbed four hosts right out of the box, made small revisions to the parameters and were able to send a terabyte. We took up 96 percent of the satellite link’s available capacity. Granted, we had a lot of help from our partners, and about $4 million worth of equipment running, but we proved them wrong.”
   

Satellite’s Broadband Challenge
In a May 2008 report, “IPTV Acceleration Puts Satellite in a Corner,” iSuppli, an electronics market research firm, questioned the commercial satellite industry’s ability to keep up with the broadband speed of IP technology, noting that video consumption is about to enter a paradigm shift that will leave satellite services in the dust. iSuppli suggested that the commercial satellite industry’s weakness was a slow uplink, preventing interactive advertising, customizable programming and voice recognition services from being exclusive to providers like Dish Network and DirecTV.
    Steve Rago, a principal analyst with iSuppli, said that satellite and IP networks would have to form telecoms or hybrid systems in order for the satellite TV industry to survive in the United States.
    Beering believes the uplink technology is there for satellites to remain competitive in the market, but that commercial companies somehow do not have as big of an appetite for research and development as the federal government.  “I think there is a lot less patience for research all around,” he said. “Once certain capabilities become real, it is expected to make its way into the commercial market pretty quickly. My team is one of the conduits between the technology the government has and the commercial market. We’ll do development on the government side that is federally funded and development to adapt that technology to a production customer. It used to take three to five years for that to happen. It has been as little as a year before. Trust me, the capabilities are there.”
    Beering claims he is working on a government project that will be in the commercial industry’s hands within three months, including an inflatable satellite communications antenna.
    “Paul Gierow at GATR is developing the inflatable satcom antenna. He’s got customers that are pushing him,” said Beering. “Once he has all his certifications, and once he has the system he feels is deployable, they’re ready to buy it. The problem he needed to solve for the inflatable antenna was the physics and mechanics of it. Solving it involved a five-year development. However, from the time that development is commercially viable to the time that the commercial industry picks it up is going to be measured in weeks.”
    On the military and government side, Beering has his hands full with efforts such as Project Golden Phoenix with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which uses emerging technologies in real world situations to help the department’s Directorate of Science and Technology collect data and make quick decisions. The inflatable satcom antenna is part of the project’s toolbox for building emergency networks that stream video from unmanned aerial vehicles.
    “Its an extremely advanced project with a lot of complicated players,” said Beering. “The only issue is synchronizing the funding. I would say that these operations will make these organizations run much more efficiently with much faster data transfer rates.”
     How fast can Beering deliver data? His project with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency will provide live mission support on the satellite-IP network for rocket targeting. “We’re working closely with Sandia [National Laboratories] on this project, its companion project is with the Naval Air Command providing impressive airborne video delivery via high-performance satellite links and IP networks. These projects represent some of the highest tech networking that I am aware of.”