IP-over-Satellite: Internet Connectivity Blasts Off.
This article was about sending information packets over satellites. With the inevitable increase in people and businesses joining the already crowded internet, many companies are looking towards a non terrestrial based way of to share files and transmit information. .
Satellites are now being used as links between earth based networks. The use of satellites to move information is not a new technology. It was invented in the 1960s by the military for their purposes. Satellites can provide direct communication over large distances anywhere around the world without the use of tangible wires. They also bypass the congested lines held by telephone companies and internet service providers. With the technology to build more powerful satellite transponders, satellites can deliver bandwidth speeds up to 155 megabits per second. These speeds allow companies to use high bandwidth applications such as streaming data or video and web casting. And because there are no cables between links, information can be shared with the most remote, hard to reach areas of the world. .
Satellites are configured in a number of different ways. "Bent pipe" involves concatenating the uplink to the downlink at the satellite to form a single transparent communication channel between the source and destination addresses on earth. The satellite basically "reflects" the original message back down to earth. This is the simplest configuration but entails the highest chance for problems. Antenna size, power requirements, and atmospheric factors could cause issues of attenuation. The second configuration talked about by the article is the OBP, or on board processing. This involves a constellation, or network of satellites connected by intersatellite links. These intersatellite links, or ISLs, typically use at least 60 GHz frequencies and operate at speeds higher than 1 gigabit per second.