By Peter J. Brown

The race is on to uplink data and Internet protocol (IP)-related traffic at a rate far beyond the level attained by video alone. As fiber networks expand, the entire cast of satellite players sees lots of reasons to play an even more aggressive game, and the uplinkers are leading the charge. Rather than running up the white flag, they are searching for–and successfully identifying–lots of opportunities, both way out in front of the cable-laying crews as well as in areas where fiber is established and abundant.

Teleport operators are doing more than repurposing content for their customers. They are making the maximum use of their assets, bundling services, and converting their access points into incubators where customers can make creative things happen. New markets are being cultivated, new hybrid fiber satellite (HFS) infrastructures are springing up, and new alliances are being formed.

“The explosive growth in demand for Internet worldwide has meant redefining the role of the teleport. These facilities are now referred to as hubs or gateways, and they are uniquely positioned to deliver every form of communications: wireless, wired, mobile and fiber. We are the link that brings the U.S. backbone to the world via satellite,” says David Liddle, vice president of broadcast services and new media at ATC Teleports, which is headquartered in Fairfax, VA.

Cooperation in the uplinking sector is becoming more common. Virtual teleports, and even constellations of teleports are emerging.

“Establishing a teleport constellation requires one of two approaches, or some combination of the two. The first, build or acquire, obligates substantial amounts of capital, and consumes precious time. The second, hiring or partnering, provides the capability to respond rapidly to market opportunities, and minimizes risk,” says Steve Strohman, president of Interlink Communications Inc. in Mountain View, CA.

“Interlink chose to extend or virtualize its master teleport in Mountain View by employing or hiring the assets of others’ teleports. Thus, Interlink established agreements with companies with existing teleports, such as Williams Communications, CSC and Redwing. As a result, Interlink has now positioned itself to offer teleport telecommunications and Internet services worldwide,” Strohman adds.

Boundaries Are Shifting

With the launch earlier this year of its new Media Xtranet service, Tulsa-based Williams Communications’ Vyvx Services is demonstrating that the boundaries of what was once seen as one of its core business-to-business (B2B) activities, centralized wide-area network (WAN) and data center management, is shifting considerably. Media Xtranet’s B2B service-related applications range from ad hosting to Webcasting, as well as media asset management with an emphasis on streaming and file-based activities.

Scott Lenahan, director of marketing for teleport and satellite services at Williams Vyvx, says that everyone is reassessing how they go about collecting and distributing content.

“We have reorganized some of our functionality to best guide and support our traditional customer base into the new era of broadband services,” says Lenahan. “Vyvx is very well positioned to support data and IP market growth, which is outpacing traditional video opportunities by a ratio of 10:1.”

Lenahan says that besides a noticeable shift away from occasional video services to dedicated data and digital video broadcasting (DVB) services, the emphasis on bundled network services is compelling Vyvx to serve as a retailer for Williams Network wholesale services.

“We are bundling DS-3 fiber, ATM, space segment and teleport services along with Williams Network capacity,” says Lenahan.

As Vyvx is now actively pursuing content distribution in the context of a full HFS network provider with an added navigational and transactional dimension, and, as Vyvx links up with IBM to offer media asset management (the initial focus is on the advertising sector, with the combination of IBM’s Content Manager media asset management platform and Williams Vyvx’s Media Xtranetb), one question still arises. Is Vyvx migrating over into the emerging domain of applications service providers, or ASPs?

“This solves the problem of the remote management of media asset management systems. We are focusing primarily on the advertising market for now, but we could expand beyond that,” says Wes Hanemayer, Williams Vyvx’s vice president of advertising and distribution services. “Are we becoming an ASP to that marketplace? I would say no. While we move the media around and manage the software, we are not quite there yet.” He points out that Vyvx already maintains 600 NT-based Compaq servers in TV stations nationwide.

“These are advertising media edge devices, not broadcast or play-to-air servers. With the emergence of standardized meta-data, and such things as MPEG 7 (Motion Pictures Expert Group), I see us someday engaging in the delivery of news in much the same manner. I see it as a natural extension of what we are doing today with advertising content,” Hanemayer says. “However, we are not working on studio-based solutions or anything else beyond our WAN and centralized data management.”

Hanemayer describes Vyvx as completely focused on broadband media services, live and non-live, along with all forms of streaming and file-based content.

“We see all of this as the logical next step as we are making the transition from analog-linear to digital, with a mix of linear and file-based transmission delivery,” says Hanemayer.

Making Room For Ip

With such things as the world’s first commercial OC-3 (155 Mbps) link already established for Embratel in Brazil, and two more expected to light up before the end of the year, the scope of activities under way at ATC Teleports is changing. ATC Teleports operates 10 teleports in the United States, with 160 antennas in its inventory, and multiple points of presence (POPs) in Europe, China and elsewhere.

“Take a look at our teleport here in Washington, DC, for example. In just over one to one-and-a-half years, we have jumped from 40 to over 200 fulltime circuits, and our Internet traffic alone is increasing 50 percent per quarter,” says Liddle, who indicates that ATC Teleports is investing heavily in the infrastructure behind the teleport, including Sonet ring connections at a number of facilities, and multiple DS-3s interconnecting its teleports. Liddle says that the latest move in this direction is a request for proposal (RFP) for a 12-node asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network that will interconnect all 10 of ATC Teleports’ sites.

“We are still concentrating on our core assets, but we are adding to our capabilities with better terrestrial network infrastructures as well as ancillary services,” says Liddle.

Kay Sears, vice president of Internet, voice and data at ATC Teleports, says that customers want multiple choices in terms of IP access, while at the same time, they want to do business at a one-stop shop.

“Our customers can choose from several different partners such as UUNet, Abovenet, Verio, and Cable and Wireless, to name a few,” Sears says.

The IP services market for uplink providers is about to go through another series of changes as voice over IP (VoIP) becomes more prevalent. This puts a much greater emphasis on the return channel, and generally changes the inbound/outbound traffic ratio from 4:1 or even higher for conventional IP to 2:1 for VoIP.

ATC Teleports is implementing a DVB platform to provide an Internet connection for smaller Internet service providers (ISPs), but the simplex DVB platforms have obvious limitations with the terrestrial back channel. Although technology to provide a satellite back channel for DVB applications is emerging, Liddle is not prepared to embrace this DVB return channel satellite, or DVB-RCS standard, as the appropriate fix until it is commercially tested and available.

“Currently, this data rate is capped and often does not meet our requirements,” Liddle says. “No real solution for the back channel exists today, and unless this is solved soon, it will have serious consequences for the industry as a whole.”

ATC Teleports conducts its own network engineering to significantly reduce costs and achieve encoding efficiencies by optimizing modulation and forward error correction (FEC), for example. Sears indicates that a jump from 1/2 to 7/8 FEC can result in savings of 30 percent or more per MB per month as the theoretical maximum throughput in a 36 MHz transponder rises from 27 Mbps to 46 Mbps using standard QPSK modulation. Switch to 8PSK or 16QAM, and the cost falls even more dramatically.

“Most of our circuits right now are asymmetric using SCPC carriers in both directions. Less than 10 percent of our circuits are simplex,” says Sears. “One way to help our customers cut their space segment costs in half is to simply have them upgrade from 2.4-meter to 3.8-meter C-band antennas.”

Sears indicates that ATC Teleports is looking at technologies that are more efficient.

“We have been evaluating DVB applications, time division multiple access (TDMA) along with demand assigned multiple access (DAMA)–solutions for our corporate clients,” Sears says.

With link design enhancements on the user side and demand surging, ATC Teleports is in the midst of updating its network management and control operations. Among other things, a $75,000 software management contract has been awarded to Bitwrench in Washington, DC, in order to develop an optimal shared realtime traffic control capability. This will be paired with ATC Teleports’ existing HP Open View network management control software.

“We intend to blend this proprietary IP network monitoring solution with commercial off-the-shelf products. We also use the What’s Up software from IPswitch.com to perform trace routes every 30 seconds,” Sears says.

“Ultimately, all the different technologies converge. And where do they converge? There’s only one point, and we are it,” Liddle says.

Southern Exposure For Smaller Players

With two dozen customers using dedicated circuits into Latin America, Interlink Communications is sticking with C-band. Interlink, the former services division of California Microwave, emerged in 1998 at what was also once a GE Spacenet teleport, and prior to that, Equatorial Communications. Interlink has been acquired by Houston-based Telscape International, which in turn is merging with Atlanta-based Pointe Communications.

“We are not a big player yet. Yes, there is growing competition in this part of the world, but there is significant and increasing demand as well,” Strohman says. “We specialize in getting new telephony and Internet service providers in particular off the ground. It is already a complicated enough process, and when you add in such things as protocol conversion, it can be pretty overwhelming for anyone who lacks the right amount of engineering know-how.”

Interlink will do the entire job end-to-end, ranging from the upfront analysis, including link budget calculations and network configuration, to hardware procurement and installation.

Telscape International and Pointe Communications are heavily focused on providing telephony services, including pre-paid calling cards to the Hispanic community. While Point Communications is a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) in Los Angeles–and soon in San Francisco–Telscape International provides all call center services for the U.S. embassy in Mexico, among other things.

As a result, Interlink is fast-becoming a satellite network overlay to Telscape’s fiber optic network in Mexico, while at the same time, a CLEC switch is being collocated at the Interlink teleport in Mountain View, CA, which has three 11-meter C-band uplinks and a 7-meter Ku-band uplink. Thus far, voice switching and VoIP has not been integrated into this facility, according to Strohman.

“By proceeding with a fiber optic network throughout the major hubs in Mexico that need a satellite overlay, we are not only leveraging on important contacts there, but we are setting the stage for the possible replication of these types of services elsewhere as well,” says Strohman.

Strohman says that in addition to Mexico, Interlink is particularly active in the Caribbean, along with Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, where six new dedicated circuits have recently been activated.

Interlink has capacity on Satmex’s Solidaridad 2, while Pointe Communications, which has its own teleports in Houston, Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Costa Rica and El Salvador, maintains capacity on Satmex 5.

“We are providing symmetric and asymmetric circuits up to T1 speed (1.544 Mbps), both ways. We price them by the month, and include a teleport charge. Our customers pay a fixed fee, and we provide direct access to tier 1 Internet providers such as AT&T, UUNet, Sprint and Cable and Wireless,” says Strohman.

“Keeping it simple and straightforward lowers our overhead, and reduces the fees for our customers at the same time,” adds Strohman, who emphasizes that one other key element influences success in this industry: the ability to win and sustain a customer’s confidence and loyalty. “In a competitive environment, this requires the forging of a close personal relationship,” Strohman says.

Streamlining The Teleport

BT Broadcast Services is also redefining the role of the traditional teleport with new IP services and fiber overlays. “We’re doing a significant amount of transiting of traffic for IP backbone services for ISPs,” says Jon Romm, general manager of BT North America Broadcast Services. “We are moving into the ability to provide additional services like caching, so that we’re delivering content to the edge of closed networks. And in addition, we’ve been working on products for what we call ‘digital content management services’ with server-based store and forward or live programming capabilities, which we’re presently doing out of London.”

Fiber is also becoming an integral part of BT’s overall service offering. “We’re in the process of laying out a fiber network that connects London, Paris, New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles,” Romm says. “That fiber is an augmentation to all of the owned and operated teleports that we have, and so we put it together. In point-to-point applications, or situations that might not command the need to be as dynamic as satellite capacity can be for certain networks, we’ll use the fiber contribution, or we may use them in conjunction with each other to provide redundancy for an important service.”

BT has also begun to experiment more and more with an alternative to the traditional “dish farms” of the past. “We’re recognizing a trend: higher-power satellites don’t need the same size of antennas,” Romm explains. “Digital muxing services give you the opportunity to have better link budgets. Therefore, you can reduce the amount of antennas that you need, you can use smaller antennas, and you can point those dishes at the satellite capacity that you have, so you can provide a value-added service to your customer base, and a total end-to-end service without having to order up occasional-use services. BT is beginning to repeat what we did in Washington, DC: we’ll go downtown, we’ll focus on the capacities that we have, we’ll have two antennas on the roof and the rest we’ll go outsource to other capabilities.

“Our desire is to stay vibrant and very profitable, and maintain our cost structure,” Romm concludes, “but in doing that not risk any quality of service to our customer base, and instead give them some economies of scale as we reduce our costs.”

Going Ip End To End

Globecast America–the broadcast services unit of France Telecom headquartered in Miami–is just one example of a company which is making a very rapid leap into all facets of the IP sector, and is now fully engaged in such services as store-and-forward, caching, IP multicasting, digital desktop delivery and Webcast hosting. Robert Behar, president and CEO of Globecast America, describes this evolution at Globecast to a full-service, multi-teleport, distribution network in the United States as an absolute necessity.

“We are maximizing our resources. We are going forward with what we see as one of the best ways to attack the Web from the standpoint of IP-based content distribution and production. We are doing more than expanding our services. Instead, we are trying to move our customers in the most effective fashion in that space between the TV broadcast server, the archive and the Web itself,” says Behar.

Globecast is using Telstar 5 and the Philips ClevercastPC platform as a way to access the desktop via IP multicasting. This is well beyond the scope of Globecast’s traditional role as a provider of both digital video distribution services and ISP backbone connectivity.

“IP multicasting in particular has been a long process. Nobody can get their hands around it,” says Behar. “We are starting to deliver video to the desktop with Philips. We needed a global organization with worldwide support to do this, and Philips provides it.”

Behar describes Globecast America as an interconnected satellite network comprised of five teleports across the United States. Globecast does Webcast hosting and distributes streaming content to customers worldwide out of Miami, while IP multicasting is handled by Globecast’s operational center in Salt Lake City. A mix of Cisco 3600 and 7200 series routers, Cisco Catalyst switches, and Dell 2450 rack-mount servers lie at the heart of this new service area. Globecast’s customers have direct access to external storage arrays too, with the capacity to store over 400 GB of Realvideo, Microsoft Media Player, or Apple Quicktime content per server.

“The availability of scalable data storage for archiving video purposes is just a small piece of this. The product still has to be ready,” says Behar, who indicates that Globecast is constantly looking at new and innovative ways to meet its customers’ needs. Among other things, Globecast America is evaluating the new Streamfactory line of products from Pinnacle Systems in Mountain View, CA.

While uplinkers are responding rapidly to the increased demands for IP-related links and services, Behar is surprised that fiber providers are so backed up. He indicates that lead times of 90 to 120 days are not uncommon.

“It takes at least 60 days to secure a DS-3 connection. If you want anything more, you have to wait and wait. In Miami, the fiber providers are overworked, and there is a noticeable shortage (of fiber) in Los Angeles,” says Behar. “Sure, it may be more expensive to interconnect to the backbone via satellite, but at least you can connect rapidly.”

Taking Them To The Edge

The satellite uplink services sector in the United Kingdom is beaming and streaming lots of IP content, and this bullish scenario at companies such as NTL, Merlin Communications International Ltd., and Satellite Media Services shows no sign of abating as new antennas are springing up like poppies south of London in particular.

Nowhere is this rapid growth in the U.K. uplinking market more evident than in Winchester, one hour southwest of London. There, NTL is adding a second, completely automated and remotely operated teleport at Mourn Hill, where 20 antennas up to 16 meters in diameter are planned. This will be added to its existing facility just ten miles away in Crawley Court, where a total of 30 antennas up to 13 meters are already in place, according to Tony Orwin, sales manager of business and events TV at NTL.

Orwin reports that NTL was erecting a new dish every six to eight weeks to keep pace with demand last year, and that the B2B and BTV sectors are solid contributors to this positive trend at NTL.

“Dish density has been a hot topic here for months. We were even compelled to dig up one of our parking lots in order to accommodate a dish, and it did not stop there,” Orwin says.

“It has been two years since NTL purchased Uplynx in order to form the nucleus of its SNG unit, which is now doing remarkably well,” says Orwin. “And the ad hoc or occasional use group has grown from 20 employees to 120 employees in the same span of time.”

Orwin reports that with IP on fire all across Europe, NTL is out front in terms of IP research and development, and that NTL will commence streaming services soon.

“There are lots of companies providing streaming services, but NTL has the advantage of simultaneous connectivity to fiber and satellite, so that full bandwidth signals as DVB/MPEG 2 can be delivered directly to the streaming processors,” Orwin says.

Approximately 70 percent of NTL’s trans-Atlantic traffic is now flowing over the AC-1 fiber, a 50/50 joint venture with Williams Vyvx, according to Orwin. In April, NTL announced that it had signed a five-year contract with California-based Interpacket Network’s “Espresso” Internet over satellite service to provide pan-European uplinking services using Sirius 2. This includes Interpacket Network’s full range of high-speed backbone connectivity, Internet applications and IP multicasting services. The DS-3 (45 Mbps) Expresso feed, which can be expanded to OC-3 (155 Mbps) arrives at Crawley Court via dual-path synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) fiber from Tele House in London’s Docklands.

At the same time, the demand for specialized distribution and production services such as video news releases (VNR) is quite good. NTL has positioned itself to offer critical services such as the controlled release of event specific news, which can be a surprisingly burdensome undertaking.

“We have the ability to offer the entire VNR package, along with other products and services, as complete solutions. This means we can handle everything right from the camera all the way through distribution to the PC or TV, whether by fiber or by satellite. We also tap off-site production houses frequently enough to get a compelling rate,” Orwin says. “What this does is save our clients from the multiple mark-ups and logistical headaches–the hassles–which arise when a job is outsourced.

“We are distilling our clients’ aspirations down into a limited number of generic products, while taking the necessary steps to avoid duplication internally,” Orwin adds. “Both fiber and satellite are growing off each other. And fiber is not everywhere.”

Merlin Communications International Ltd. is preparing to add a number of new antennas to its uplink facility in Fareham. Its biggest customer is the BBC, whose extensive radio signal distribution requirements are met by Merlin in the form of an MPEG 2-based audio service spread over partial transponders on five satellites.

“London is getting too expensive for video playout centers,” says Rory MacLachlan, commercial director at Merlin.

“The biggest challenge is defining the customer’s true needs,” says MacLachlan. “Customers sometimes tend to have a vague concept of what they want, and what is achievable. And many want to go right to the edge of the dot.com phenomenon.

“The content provider needs to ask what kind of experience are you providing. Beyond that, all of our customers are asking more in-depth questions these days, and they all want IP over satellite in all flavors,” he adds.

For CNBC, for example, Merlin provides full streaming services. After downlinking the CNBC global TV feed, it is then re-uplinked at 300 kbps on Sirius 2 as a DVB desktop feed. Merlin uses Telenor’s Conax smart card-based encryption and subscriber management solution.

“We provide Web hosting, and we are looking into caching as well as remotely controlled audio playout services,” says MacLachlan. “IP streaming, and IP multicasting are just getting underway in Europe. We have done some ad hoc IP multicasting, but there is not much out there in terms of software and PCI cards are not ubiquitous here either.”

Among other things, Merlin has initiated a joint venture with the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA) known as Iris Gateway Satellite Services Ltd., which is based out of the CYTA earth station in Makarios. This facility can access satellites such as Sirius 2, Asiasat 2, Intelsat 707, and Eutelsat’s Hot Bird as well as CYTA’s extensive undersea fiber network, which extends throughout Europe and the Middle East.

A Certain Kind Of Synergy

“We have talked about super-POPs in the past. The reality is that this year, this growing emphasis on the teleport as a super-POP is happening as people start leveraging their assets and building HFS networks,” says Stephen G. Tom, president of Virginia-based Teleport Consulting Group International L.L.C., and chairman of World Teleport Association (WTA). “The relationship of teleports to wireless protocols, and the synergy between towers and teleports, is becoming apparent as well.” Among other things, Tom reports that Cisco Systems has just joined the WTA.

Tom indicates that the management of teleport services via the IP platforms for direct customer access and monitoring and control is coming at a fast clip.

“This is more than just deploying SNMP–simple network management protocol. It is going to be a completely browser-driven phenomenon for customers that is likely to include on- line bandwidth brokerage facilities as well,” Tom says. “And as the rest of the B2B world has learned, customer service does not go away, it intensifies.”

So uplinking, which was once a business built around the distribution of satellite signals to far off places, is now far more interactive, far more challenging, and far more diversified. And yet, satellites still constitute some of the best and most consistent sources for signals in all shapes and sizes, anywhere on the planet.

As Via Satellite’s senior multimedia editor, Peter J. Brown tracks the global industry’s multimedia and Internet applications. He lives on Mount Desert Island, ME.

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