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."

Comments

Re:Just how much bandwidth is up there?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just how much bandwidth is up there?

[NMerriam]

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.

Re:Videophone

[phil reed]

My question is this: why are all the reporters who are reporting "via videophone" burdened with such bad reception?

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.