nanog mailing list archives
Re: 60ms cross continent
From: Denys Fedoryshchenko <nuclearcat () nuclearcat com>
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2020 05:47:43 +0300
On 2020-07-08 10:05, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 7/Jul/20 21:58, Eric Kuhnke wrote:Watching the growth of terrestrial fiber (and PTP microwave) networks going inland from the west and east African coasts has been interesting. There's a big old C-band earth station on the hill above Freetown, Sierra Leone that was previously the capital's only link to the outside world. Obsoleted for some years now thanks to the submarine cable and landing station. I imagine they might keep things live as a backup path with a small C-band transponder MHz commit and SCPC modems linked to an earth station somewhere in Europe, but not with very much capacity or monthly cost. The landing station in Mogadishu had a similar effect.The early years of submarine fibre in Africa always had satellite as a backup. In fact, many satellite companies that served Africa withInternet prior to submarine fibre were banking on subsea and terrestrialfailures to remain relevant. It worked between 2009 - 2013, when terrestrial builds and operation had plenty of teething problems. Those companies have since either disappeared or moved their services over to fibre as well. In that time, it has simply become impossible to have any backup capacity on satellite anymore. There is too much active fibre bandwidth being carried around and out of/into Africa for any satellite system to make sense. Rather, diversifying terrestrial and submarine capacity is the answer, and that is growing quite well. Plenty of new cable systems that are launching this year, next year and the next 3 years. At the moment, one would say there is sufficientsubmarine capacity to keep the continent going in case of a major subseacut (like we saw in January when both the WACS and SAT-3 cables got cut at the same time, and were out for over a month). Satellite earth stations are not irrelevant, however. They still do get used to provide satellite-based TV services, and can also be used for media houses who need to hook up to their network to broadcast videowhen reporting in the region (even though uploading a raw file back homeover the Internet is where the tech. has now gone). Mark.
I don't think traditional satellites have much future as backbone. Only as broadcasting media. Most are still acting as dumb RF converters, but we can't expect much more from them. On geostationary orbit, it is not only expensive to bring each additional kg, but also they need to keep it simple as possible, as it is all above van allen belt, and it needs to run there
without any maintenance for 7+ years.So if SpaceX managed to squeeze in their satellites at least basic processing (and seems they did),
it will improve satellite capabilities (and competitiveness) greatly.The only thing i hope, if they had space for some M2M IoT stuff, similar to ORBCOMM.
Current thread:
- Re: 60ms cross continent, (continued)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Eric Kuhnke (Jul 06)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Denys Fedoryshchenko (Jul 06)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Eric Kuhnke (Jul 06)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Denys Fedoryshchenko (Jul 06)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Eric Kuhnke (Jul 07)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 07)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Eric Kuhnke (Jul 07)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 08)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Paul Nash (Jul 08)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 08)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Denys Fedoryshchenko (Jul 08)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mike Lyon (Jul 08)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Denys Fedoryshchenko (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Eric Kuhnke (Jul 06)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Christopher Munz-Michielin (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Christopher Munz-Michielin (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Masataka Ohta (Jul 09)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Mark Tinka (Jul 10)
- Re: 60ms cross continent Eric Kuhnke (Jul 10)