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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."
I know from working at different military installations that commercial services are used quite often for military purposes. All of the projects I've worked on utilizing satellite comms have always been over commercial satellites with Type-1 encryption.
I say let them have it. Better the Pentagon use it for something constructive than biased talking heads for their fluffed up stories.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I've always wondered about the amount of actual bandwidth available to news organizations like CNN, the BBC and the rest. It's one of those things that came to mind whenever I'd see something like the grainy videophone footage we got used to in Gulf War 1.0, that looked like it was shot with a QuickCam using the Sony Pantycam(tm) image enhancement.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
So fast and easy to use, no wonder its number 1!!! Even make use of parental filters!
(ducks)
Someone tell these guys there's a War going on.
At a time like this, they shouldn't be downloading more pr0n!
--
GWB: "My troops went Iraq, and all they brought home for me was a lousy body bag"
It seems more likely to me that they'd be given carte blanche out of either patriotism, or the desire to capitalise on same ("Hey look, we gave more than anyone else to the War Effort").
Just how safe is this? Their data can be compromised and sold to other countries by greedy and unethical companies. Their protocols and encryption methods can be cracked and discovered. Think of the implications.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
While information to the citizens is important, the safety of the people that are doing the fighting comes first. They need data to do their job and come home in one piece. THAT is the first priority.
What screwy priorities, there should be *no* issue... ' we need the bandwidth, too bad' ' you |biased| news services can have what is left'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With the budget that the Pentagon has, I'm sure that's no competition...
The Pentagon competing with the likes of CNN and the BBC over sattelite time?
:|
"We now cross live to our correspondant, Richard Jones, in the north of Iraq..."
"Affirmative.. unit 4, prepare to advance on the enemy position to your south."
"Ermmmm...."
I know it wouldn't happen, but hey.. at least try and have a little humour at such a bad time
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Find public companies that own satellites inolved in this and invest heavily for one to three weeks.
Deep pockets are going to fight over limited resources - which means a lot of money is going to be exchanged in the short term.
Assuming that they satellite companies don't offer some sort of bargain deal or preference to the military/gov't, then they are looking to make a metric crapload on this.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
With the military using satelite bandwidth, will this have any effect on SPAM? It would be a shame if the whole SPAMMER infrastructure came to a halt during the war. Most likely I just miss out on re-runs of Gilligan's Island. And as far as politics are concerned, I stopped being ashamed to be an American the day Hill Billy Boy left office.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
the goddamn size 85 arial fonts should
help the bandwidth problem. Half the
page is only three words.
That's got to help.
Of course I almost had a
seizure when I first loaded it.
-J
My question is this: why are all the reporters who are reporting "via videophone" burdened with such bad reception? A decent ISDN connection should be able to have fairly smooth video and audio, yet the CNN reporter on the USS Lincoln and the CNN reporter in Northern Iraq both had super-grainy video and sketchy audio. Don't these reporters have access to a satellite uplink? And if not, why can't they get enough bandwidth over a decent ISDN connection?
Anyone knows about a working webcam in iraq?
I heard that civilian use of GPS may become less acurate, during war. This morning I fired mine up and it says: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you're the biggest customer, you would have the added benefit of being able to task sats not only to cover what you want, but also to *not* cover areas you'd just as soon commercial services not have access to.
GWB just wants to make sure his access to nickjr.com remains unimpeded.
Best Windows Freeware
The Pentagon "is hoovering up all the available capacity," said Richard DalBello, president of the Satellite Industry Association, a trade group.
I can't tell if he's amazed or excited. Chances are DalBello is calculating his stock options as we speak. War will always make some people millionaires.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
...So, My hard earned money that gets sucked away to taxes is being spent on access to corporately owned satellites that are in a bidding war for either A) Keeping our troops safe or B) Letting Geraldo Rivera run around in the desert and state idiotic comments and a bunch of talking heads bouncing signals saying the same stupid things over and over.
Great.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
They already control the uplinks, why not take the logical next step and use the bandwidth when the journalists aren't?
It's not like the media is going to report anything negative about them... they want to keep their "approved" status.
Sukotto
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
It looks like the Govt. is not only buying up bandwidth, but also commercial satellite photography services.
I don't htink USA has any shortage of imaging tech., most probably trying to stop Saddam from buying the images
How are they going to stop bin Laden tho. , how long can they monopolize commercial satellites?
Scary.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
An Inmarsat spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the company puts all of its customers on equal footing.
Media companies such as Fox pay about $1.50 per minute for voice communication via satellite and about $6 per minute to transmit video.
I must admit I'm really surprised by these numbers. $1.50 for voice is not far from what we paid for ordinary cell phones 5 years ago. Will be interesting to see if these kind of services can be extended to the use of ordinary people one day.
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!
Silly. The military has plenty of bandwidth, they buy up commercial bandwidth during conflicts to keep bad guys from using it. They probably buy up bandwidth and then sell it back to CNN and other friendly services, maybe at a loss, but it's just another mechanism for controlling information in the battlefield.
Two things,
1) I would guess (having not read the article) that any information that is encrypted tighter than a whale's bum under water, is either comms stuff, or information that is non-critical, things like before and after shots of Saddam's royal palaces, the before shot might be useful but the smoking crater that is the after shot will be very little use, and almost indistinguishable from all the other smoking holes in the ground
2) As to the civilian satellites being targets, despite what the spin doctoring and hawks would have you believe Saddam would have trouble getting ordinance to hit a barn door at 50 metres, never mind picking satellites off.
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
since Washington is probably the main target for retaliation.
Yea? Maybe they should hold the Acadmy Awards there in stead of Hollywood...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
And the Pentagon has to compete on the market with all the news organizations trying to cover the conflict in Iraq
... We can? Well, thanks!"
"Hello, CBS? We'd like some of that bandwidth you've reserved. No? Well, OK. Say, out of pure curiosity, what are Dan Rather's coordinates?
It is time for our great country of America to end our dependence on publicly held bandwidth!
We will no longer allow our children to be held hostage by the threat of foriegn satellites. We will be resolute and just in our cause, as we cannot risk anymore lives.
Without going to war with any country that threatens to charge us for data access, we would allow the proliferation of ways to take our money and force us to act like a responsible part of the world. We will not allow this to happen.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
If we're jamming every radio communication in Iraq and taking out their telephones, how is it that CNN et al can have live broadcats out of Baghdad? I assume that we can selectively jam communications, or is it something else?
I merely said bias.. few, if any simply REPORT the news now, its all commentary based interpretation of the news.
Thus why I said biased. I'm not making judgments of which side is right or wrong.. Only that its no longer simple news reporting.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A state of war exists when Congress passes a delaration of war.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Bandwidth shmandwidth. This is propaganda control!
...take the attitude which is entirely hostile to the free spread of information."
...electronic media... mediums, of the military above Bhagdad... they'd be fired down on. Even if they were journalists ..."
...those uplinks and satellite phones I was talking about. And control access to the airwaves."
BBC correspondent Kate Adie who is now covering the US invasion reports in an interview on Irish radio about pentegon censorship:
"I've seen a complete erosion of any kind of acknowledgment that reporters should be able to report as they witness. The Americans... and I've been talking to the Pentagon
"I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon, that if uplinks--that is the television signals out of... Bhagdad, for example--were detected by any planes
Some will argue this is a necessary step in protecting the invaders, but this threat came well before the 'war' started. I for one doubt physical safety is anywhere close the true goal here. Political and public opinion safety is more like it.
And perhaps foreshadowing our buying up extra bandwidth for 'backup' Adie later in the interview says:
"...the Americans are: a) Asking journalists who go with them, whether they are... have feelings against the war. And therefore if you have views that are skeptical, then you are not to be acceptable.
Secondly, they are intending to take control of the Americans technical equipment
Guess she had it right.
A description of the interview with links to audio and other sources can be found here
Hey! Where's _All My Children_? There's some guy in a green outfit and hat, talking funny while eating dinner instead! Damn networks! You just *can't* get good TV anymore! :-)
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.