Transporting Video Data, Overseas?

p0rkmaster asks: "I've been asked to try to research the cheapest way to get a fat pipe between San Jose, Calif. and the island of Guam. My client is the owner of 3 television stations on the island, and they buy most of their programming and do a lot of production work in a facility in San Jose. They are currently using the U.S. Postal Service to get them across the pond, which is introducing a 4-5 day lag. They are upgrading to digital facilities on the island and are interested in investigating moving the content over the Internet....or a private pipe. They would probably need a *minimum* of 15Mbit pipe to be able to handle their current requirements, which is 20 hours of NTSC-quality MPEG2 video a day. I'm guessing that in the near future they'll need to handle higher bandwidth when they begin broadcasting a digital signal. Any suggestions? Should I look at satellite services or a telco that can sell me space on the submarine fiber?"

Comments

This is what satellites were built for.

[human bean]

I know about this. In my youth I used to spend a great deal of time at the airport waiting for tapes to arrive.

Unless you have a requirement for serious backhaul services, just drop your three video feeds directly on any of the normal carrier's sat feeds, downlink at Guam, and rebroadcast.

End equipment costs will be a lot less than digital (for now, at any rate) and your most probable configuration is fairly normal (read: you can find someone to fix it).

Having seen what the military puts up with from FTS2001 and the commercial carriers, I would stay as far away from that sort of service as I could get.