Tooway
Encyclopedia
Satellite Internet access
Satellite Internet access is Internet access provided through satellites. The service can be provided to users world-wide through low Earth orbit satellites. Geostationary satellites can offer higher data speeds, but their signals can not reach some polar regions of the world...
Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
service available across Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. The service was launched in 2007 via two Eutelsat
Eutelsat
Eutelsat S.A. is a French-based satellite provider. Providing coverage over the entire European continent, as well as the Middle East, Africa, India and significant parts of Asia and the Americas, it is one of the world's three leading satellite operators in terms of revenues.Eutelsat’s satellites...
geostationary
Geostationary orbit
A geostationary orbit is a geosynchronous orbit directly above the Earth's equator , with a period equal to the Earth's rotational period and an orbital eccentricity of approximately zero. An object in a geostationary orbit appears motionless, at a fixed position in the sky, to ground observers...
satellites, Hot Bird
Hot Bird
Hot Bird is the name of a popular family of satellites operated by Eutelsat, located at 13°E over the Equator and with a transmitting footprint over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East....
6 and Eurobird
Eurobird
Eurobird is the name for a set of satellites owned by Eutelsat. The Eurobird satellites provide broadcasting and telecommunication services primarily to the Western and Central European region from orbital positions of 28.5, 25.5 and 33 degrees East....
3, respectively at the 13° and 33° East orbital positions.
Tooway service over these two satellites provided up to 3.6 Mbit/s
Data rate units
In telecommunications, bit rate or data transfer rate is the average number of bits, characters, or blocks per unit time passing between equipment in a data transmission system. This is typically measured in multiples of the unit bit per second or byte per second.- Avoiding confusion :To be as...
downstream and up to 384 kbit/s
Data rate units
In telecommunications, bit rate or data transfer rate is the average number of bits, characters, or blocks per unit time passing between equipment in a data transmission system. This is typically measured in multiples of the unit bit per second or byte per second.- Avoiding confusion :To be as...
upstream
Upstream (networking)
In computer networking, upstream refers to the direction in which data can be transferred from the client to the server . This differs greatly from downstream not only in theory and usage, but also in that upstream speeds are usually at a premium...
at a flat rate price and without the need for a terrestrial connection.
At the end of 2010, Eutelsat launched KA-SAT
KA-SAT
KA-SAT is a telecommunications satellite owned by Eutelsat. The satellite will provide broadband Internet access services across Europe and also a small area of the Middle East. It is positioned at 9°E, joining Eurobird 9A Ku band satellite. KA-SAT was manufactured by EADS Astrium, based on the...
, the first European high-capacity multi-beam satellite to operate in Ka band
Ka band
The Ka band covers the frequencies of 26.5–40 GHz. The Ka band is part of the K band of the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum. This symbol refers to "K-above" — in other words, the band directly above the K-band...
. KA-SAT was positioned at 9° East, and delivers Internet access and broadcast
Broadcast
Broadcast or Broadcasting may refer to:* Broadcasting, the transmission of audio and video signals* Broadcast, an individual television program or radio program* Broadcast , an English electronic music band...
services toward Europe and the Mediterranean Basin
Mediterranean Basin
In biogeography, the Mediterranean Basin refers to the lands around the Mediterranean Sea that have a Mediterranean climate, with mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers, which supports characteristic Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub vegetation...
. Commercial service started on KA-SAT at the end of May 2011.
Services
Tooway makes use of the Internet ProtocolInternet Protocol
The Internet Protocol is the principal communications protocol used for relaying datagrams across an internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite...
over satellite to provide consumers across Europe and the Mediterranean Basin with Internet access
Internet access
Many technologies and service plans for Internet access allow customers to connect to the Internet.Consumer use first became popular through dial-up connections in the 20th century....
. Unlike services relying on terrestrial infrastructures (such as cable
Cable internet
In telecommunications, cable Internet access, often shortened to cable Internet or simply cable, is a form of broadband Internet access that uses the cable television infrastructure. Like digital subscriber line and fiber to the premises services, cable Internet access provides network edge...
or ADSL), satellites provide service in wide coverage
Coverage (telecommunication)
In telecommunications, the coverage of a radio station is the geographic area where the station can communicate. Broadcasters and telecommunications companies frequently produce coverage maps to indicate to users the station's intended service area. Coverage depends on several factors, such as...
areas as broad as a continent
Continent
A continent is one of several very large landmasses on Earth. They are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, with seven regions commonly regarded as continents—they are : Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia.Plate tectonics is...
.
Terrestrial wireless broadband technologies focus on dense urban
Urban area
An urban area is characterized by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets.Urban areas are created and further...
centers and leave consumers outside these areas with narrowband
Narrowband
In radio, narrowband describes a channel in which the bandwidth of the message does not significantly exceed the channel's coherence bandwidth. It is a common misconception that narrowband refers to a channel which occupies only a "small" amount of space on the radio spectrum.The opposite of...
connections or no connection at all.
Unserved and unsatisfied users were estimated to reach 30 million households in Western
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
and Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
by 2010.
Tooway services operate over and via Eutelsat's geostationary satellites. This enabled bit rate
Bit rate
In telecommunications and computing, bit rate is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time....
s of 3.6 Mbit/s downstream and 384 kbit/s upstream in 2009. Service differentiation is done on volume consumption per month through a Fair Access Policy. When consumption is above volume thresholds, the service remains available but at lower speeds.
Tooway also provides a Voice over IP
Voice over IP
Voice over Internet Protocol is a family of technologies, methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission techniques for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks, such as the Internet...
service for voice telephone calls over the Internet.
In mid-2011, commercial use of KA-SAT with the SurfBeam 2 system from ViaSat
ViaSat
ViaSat is a communication company based in Carlsbad, California, that provides equipment and services for military and commercial communications, primarily in satellite related technologies...
allowed higher bit-rates and volumes at the same price over the European coverage area.
Since KA-SAT is located at 9°E, near Eutelsat's HOT BIRD TV neighborhood (13° East), Internet Protocol services can be combined with Digital Video Broadcasting television service using a single satellite dish with two low noise block-downconverters.
This means subscribers can access satellite TV channels without additional dishes.
Tooway also markets IPTV
IPTV
Internet Protocol television is a system through which television services are delivered using the Internet protocol suite over a packet-switched network such as the Internet, instead of being delivered through traditional terrestrial, satellite signal, and cable television formats.IPTV services...
services with Video on Demand
Video on demand
Video on Demand or Audio and Video On Demand are systems which allow users to select and watch/listen to video or audio content on demand...
and Digital video recorder
Digital video recorder
A digital video recorder , sometimes referred to by the merchandising term personal video recorder , is a consumer electronics device or application software that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card or other local or networked mass storage device...
features.
Technology
ViaSat SurfBeam technology uses the Ka band, approximately twice as high in frequencyFrequency
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency.The period is the duration of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency...
as Ku band. This implies a smaller beam which contributes towards smaller end-user terminals.
| Uplink Uplink A telecommunications link is generally one of several types of information transmission paths such as those provided by communication satellites to connect two points on earth.-Uplink:... |
Downlink | |
|---|---|---|
| Ka band | 27.5 GHz - 30.0 GHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... |
17.7 GHz - 20.2 GHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... |
| Ku band | 12.75 GHz - 14.5 GHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... |
10.7 GHz - 12.75 GHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... |
Smaller beams allow more efficient use of satellite power on the forward link and improved G/T (Gain-over-Temperature
Link budget
A link budget is the accounting of all of the gains and losses from the transmitter, through the medium to the receiver in a telecommunication system. It accounts for the attenuation of...
) on the return link. Smaller beams draw smaller cells on ground (beam footprint) which also permits more cells in a given service area, increasing frequency reuse.
Ka band has less interference than Ku band , since fewer satellites operate in this frequency.
Tooway and ViaSat SurfBeam make use of DVB-S2
DVB-S2
Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation is a digital television broadcast standard that has been designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S system. It was developed in 2003 by the , an international industry consortium, and ratified by ETSI in March 2005...
Variable Coding and Modulation technologies.
Adaptive Coding and Modulation gathers fading
Thermal fade
A thermal fade is a phenomenon of wireless signal degradation caused by temperature and relative humidity factors. As the prevailing environmental conditions change, for example, from hot to cool, humid to arid or day to night, the electromagnetic waves refract differently thus altering the power...
conditions from each terminal and adapts signal encoding and modulation to each individual terminal's receiving condition. This allows efficient transmission to each terminal, without degenerating the efficiency of the whole network. A return channel
Return channel
In communications systems that use star topologies, the return channel is the transmission link from a user terminal to the central hub....
on the end-user terminal is needed to send the condition changes.
Variable Coding and Modulation does not require a return channel and does not adapt to fading conditions in real-time. Instead a static efficiency is defined for each terminal according to the availability needed. This improves waveform efficiency as opposed to Constant Code and Modulation which forces to apply the worst link budget
Link budget
A link budget is the accounting of all of the gains and losses from the transmitter, through the medium to the receiver in a telecommunication system. It accounts for the attenuation of...
to the entire spot.
The IPTV service uses H.264 Scalable Video Coding
Scalable Video Coding
Scalable Video Coding is the name for the Annex G extension of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard. SVC standardizes the encoding of a high-quality video bitstream that also contains one or more subset bitstreams. A subset video bitstream is derived by dropping packets from the...
(SVC) for video coding.
SVC allows transmitting the same video coded with different resolutions or bit-rates.
For example, a high definition program could be received by a terminal in clear sky conditions while the standard definition could be received by a terminal affected by fading conditions during rain. In more stringent fading conditions, a program with even lower bit-rate could use an H.264 SVC stream.
Customer Premises Equipment
The ODU is a parabolic satellite antenna
Parabolic antenna
A parabolic antenna is an antenna that uses a parabolic reflector, a curved surface with the cross-sectional shape of a parabola, to direct the radio waves. The most common form is shaped like a dish and is popularly called a dish antenna or parabolic dish...
manufactured by ViaSat of typically 60–70 cm in diameter.
The ViaSat SurfBeam antenna employs a frequency selective sub-reflector that allows reflecting one range of frequency while being transparent to another range. This feature enables the reception of both interactive services in Ka band and broadcast services (DTH) in Ku band with the same ODU.
The installation of the ODU employs automated tools for simplified antenna alignment and commissioning. The installation procedure is identical anywhere within the satellite service area and the use of circular polarization
Circular polarization
In electrodynamics, circular polarization of an electromagnetic wave is a polarization in which the electric field of the passing wave does not change strength but only changes direction in a rotary type manner....
further simplifies the setup which permits to reduce the time and cost of the home installation. Although the installation could be done by some advanced users, it is recommended to contact a certified Tooway installer.
Poor alignment of the dish system results in higher error rates and a lower broadband speed. The relatively unique transmission system of Turbo Code
Turbo code
In information theory, turbo codes are a class of high-performance forward error correction codes developed in 1993, which were the first practical codes to closely approach the channel capacity, a theoretical maximum for the code rate at which reliable communication is still possible given a...
8PSK used is not recognized with standard DVB-S or DVB-S2 installation meters.
Horizon Global Electronics
Horizon Global Electronics
Horizon Global Electronics is an electronics company. Founded in UK in 2001, it manufactures Satellite, Terrestrial and Cable Identification and alignment meters for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, and the ATSC, DVB and ISDB standards....
manufactures a Test and Measurement meter specifically designed to align the Tooway dish. HD-TC8 Applied Instruments
Applied Instruments
Applied Instruments, Inc. is a manufacturer of electronic test equipment products for the telecommunications industry. The company is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was founded in 1986.Applied Instruments, Inc...
also manufactures a Test and Measurement meter, the model Super Buddy 29, designed to align the Tooway dish. Super Buddy 29
None of these two meters are able to do the new Viasat SurfBeam DVB-S2 signals. Also for these higher capacity signals and in addition on the higher Ka band, the accuracy of the installation becomes much more critical. Maxpeak AB (publ) manufactures a meter specifically for these new signals, SAM-plus (DVB-S2 ACM and VCM)http://www.maxpeak.tv/samplus.php?lang=eng
The IDU is a satellite modem
Satellite modem
A satellite modem or sat modem is a modem used to establish data transfers using a communications satellite as a relay.There is a wide range of satellite modems from cheap devices for home internet access to expensive multifunctional equipment for enterprise use.A "modem" stands for...
providing a plug-and-play
Plug-and-play
In computing, plug and play is a term used to describe the characteristic of a computer bus, or device specification, which facilitates the discovery of a hardware component in a system, without the need for physical device configuration, or user intervention in resolving resource conflicts.Plug...
Ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
interface with DHCP. Current version is manufactured by ViaSat. A WiFi
WIFI
WIFI is a radio station broadcasting a brokered format. Licensed to Florence, New Jersey, USA, the station is currently operated by Florence Broadcasting Partners, LLC.This station was previously owned by Real Life Broadcasting...
router may be connected to the satellite modem in order to deploy wireless Internet access
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
in the home. No software is required on the computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
.
LED
LEd
LEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....
indicators on the modem front inform on satellite reception and transmission statuses (RX and TX) as well as on network activities.
The IDU is connected to the ODU using two coaxial cables.
Performance
The basic package provides bit-rates of 3.6 Mbit/s downstream and 384 kbit/s upstream with a volume (FAP) of about 2GBGigabyte
The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...
. The launch of KA-SAT in 2010 and the SurfBeam system from ViaSat allow even higher bit-rates and volumes for each subscriber. These improvements will bring Tooway service price and quality at the level of terrestrial broadband offers like ADSL-2 and cable.
The round-trip time inherent to satellite communications comes from the double hop between earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
and space
Space
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
. All communications travel at the speed of light
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...
(299 792 458 m/s) from a terminal on ground to a satellite in geostationary orbit (35 786 km), then to another terminal on earth and back. The result is roughly a half a second round-trip time which may be unsuitable for real-time
Real-time data
Real-time data denotes information that is delivered immediately after collection. There is no delay in the timeliness of the information provided. Real-time data is often used for navigation or tracking....
critical applications, including many games, though it is sufficient to support other applications.