Cebit 2008

The coolest thing I've seen so far is this demonstration of a secure satellite IP network. It's made by a division of the Department of Defence -- the Defense Science and Technology Organisation -- and it's a satellite based remote network backbone for the military.

While I was there I also got a chance to chat to the guys about satellite communications, of which I used to know only a little.

The bandwidth in satellite communications is more expensve than the satellites themselves. It would, for instance, cost millions of dollars to transmit 100MB/s video from the Antarctic, and there are other problems you'll run into.

You'd have to aim at a high bandwidth geostationary satellite near the equator, which means you'd have to transmit from the edge of the antarctic at a very low angle to compensate for the curvature of the Earth.

You'd have to supply a lot of power for the ten watt transmitter, which doesn't sound like much, but is the maximum you can transmit without screwing up other satellites that are in the line of fire from your dish back down in the Antarctic. Any more and you'd start to cause problems with other satellites that are in the way of your beam that consider your signal as noise that's sending their SNR through the floor. You can't use a narrower beam, because to do that you need a bigger parabolic dish which would be unfeasably large.

There are two types of satellites in the world: Geostationary ones that dot the equator and stay at a fixed point above the earth that transmit a lot of data very quickly and satellites that don't, like low earth orbit satellites. These babies can circle the globe every 90 minutes and do things like spy work and satellite phone communications.

And this is the military gear that was demonstrated by DSTO. It's called a Secure Satellite Internet Protocol Network (SSATIN) terminal, and it's going to be used in the field to communicate with Military servers back in Australia. It onlyu provides IP communications, which means that telephony goes through VoIP.



I'll send a Red Hat Fedora (see Page 2) to the person who most convincingly photoshops me into cammo gear.

The problem with traditional comms links is that they allocate bandwidth in equal portions to the terminals that are connected to it. What the DSTO (Defence Science and TEchnology Organisation) has done is to devise an algorithm that divides an uplink between terminals according to how much data they are using at any given time. This is the prototype modem and hardware that tackles the task, but it's been trimmed down to a single 1U rackmount box since then.



Awww yeaaah.

Back to the floor!

Updated: Hardcore video deconstruction and analysis tools, plus a wearable video screen that makes you look like Geordi from Star Trek on Page Four