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Satellite Access in Time of War
miladus writes "Interesting report in the Washington
Post this morning about how the Pentagon is buying access to commercial satellites to meet its bandwidth needs. Most of the commercial access will be used for backup to the military satellites and for non-military tasks. And the Pentagon has to compete on the market with all the news organizations trying to cover the conflict in Iraq."
Reuters has huge amounts of bandwith - they own Radianz (www.radianz.com) which is an enormous redundant network - however it is used mainly for financial data. But it is a huge network.
The military encrypts all their data though, so it doesn't matter, it's not like they send plaintext over the satelite. It's like using a VPN connection, even though anyone can see the data going through the internet, only the ends points can actually view the data.
"Knowledge makes us accountable." - Che Guevara
The reason you see VideoPhone's in certain areas is becuase they are in hostile zones. In hostile zones, all press has been warned that planes scanning above for radar sites will see an upling as a ping on them the same as a radar site... That could cause many problems. As far as reporters onboard ships, the ships are not going to give them alot of bandwidth via their sat. hookups. So they have to use what they get. Hope that helps.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
The news organizations use InMarSat video terminals -- it's a 64k ISDN connection, which is why it is so grainy.
We do a lot of this (for medical projects) and sometimes mux two channels for a 128k connection, but it is not something you'd want to troubleshoot in the field with a non-technical person. It also gets a lot bigger in size, while the little video systems the news guys have all fit in a small briefcase and have a single panel dish built in.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
it's not the bandwidth on the satellite that is an issue here. Rather, it is the uplink bandwidth available to the person on the ground. reasonable TV quality video requires 256 to 384 K. bps. In order to achieve that, you need a large antenna or some kind of a small dish. logistical constraints may prevent you from carrying that much hardware into the field. videophones are much smaller and lower power, therefore they have a much harder time getting respectable data rates up to the satellite.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
you are watching videophones runing at 56 K.
Don't these reporters have access to a satellite uplink?
that was a satellite uplink, via a satellite phone.
And if not, why can't they get enough bandwidth over a decent ISDN connection?
antenna size and power budget.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
A state of war exists when Congress passes a delaration of war.
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Actually the question of bandwidth comes up quite a bit in modern warfare. I've heard stories about how available bandwidth during the Afghanistan conflict limited the use of UAV's....they require a HUGE amount of bandwidth to do all the telepresence capabilities, and the networks are already stressed with existing communications as well as "civilian" applications on the network like P2P. They would have liked to flown a couple more, but they couldn't without a risk of bringing the entire network to a halt.
Requirements documents for combat systems carefully document acceptable network and CPU usage, specifying average throughput, peak usage, etc. in attempt to avoid just these problems, but newer combat systems by design are very network-centric, and run into some of the same problems we encounter on the commercial side.