A supplier of data comms equipment to satellite service providers has said that a new range of products could make satellite an affordable option for cellular backhaul outside of its traditional niche of remote and hard to access areas.
Key to satellite technology specialist NovelSat's claims is the recent launch of its NS3000 modem, which it says can achieve data rates of up to 716Mbps and bandwidth increases of between 20% and 50% over DVB-S2 alternatives.
The NS3000 combines NovelSat’s NS3 satellite modulation and demodulation technology, together with bi-directional IP routing and traffic compression, enabling the simultaneous transfer of data and video over a single channel.
David Furstenburg, co-chair of NovelSat, said that one provider, Hispasat, had achieved 5Mbps per Mhz throughput, using the NS3 modem. Hispasat said that it also achieved an information rate of 180 Mbps for a transponder at 36 MHz.
Furstenberg said that meant that "our modem will be able to support an E1 to the same QoS as over a 2MHz channel, with only 500kHz. "I think those are meaningful numbers," he said. "We believe we are changing the playing field. There is no other technology that can enable an STM1 on a 36MHz transponder."
So should satellite, previously used to provide backhaul from and to remote base station sites and viewed as too expensive for widespread application in mobile backhaul, be added to the wider backhaul network mix?
Furstenberg believes so. "I believe that for cellular backhaul satellite is a very attractive option, especially with the type of price reduction that I'm suggesting here. If you are able to go from 2MHz to 500kHz for an E1, this is a very dramatic cost reduction."
He also says that rural coverage should not be written off as niche, claiming that the US Postal service estimates that 74% of the US population is rural. Added to that is the spectrum shortage being complained of by many operators. "We are coming out with a product in 2013 that will support 1Gbps, which is starting to be fast enough for fast internet," he said.
Furstenberg is used to overcoming scepticism. He said that when NovelSat first stated it wanted to move DVB-S2 on to a new level, improving spectral efficiency by over 25%, most "good engineers" in the industry said it was impossible and "were laughing in our face".
"We came out around a year ago, but because of the scepticism we faced we first ran trials with all the big guys to convince them that what we have is real, robust and can be used. We started to sell the product in January 2012, and now much of the London Olympic transmission overseas is done via our technology, as well as the event Euro Cup and F1. So in the television industry we are becoming the new standard of quality."
He added that because telephony is, in his view, mostly symmetrical traffic, echo cancellation is an "excellent approach" to improve performance in future. "We believe that our echo cancellation will be much much better than anything existing today, because it is software based and has a very low noise level associated with it," he said.