At the beginning of 2008 Carlsbad, CA-based equipment manufacturer ViaSat startled the world with the announcement of ViaSat-1. Startling not only because of the capacity of the satellite, announced at 100Gbps, (but now increased to 125Gbps) represented a ten fold increase on existing Ka-Band satellites, but also because ViaSat with no operating experience was planning to enter a market dominated by two major players: WildBlue and Hughes. These two operators currently have just under one million subscribers between them.

by Lou Zacharilla, Director of Development, SSPI

Depending on whose science or projections you believe, the world is melting, its waters rising and its future looking a lot like the movie "2012." It may well be. Among the many stepping forward to help save it, the global teleport industry is now taking its turn.

The Year of Living Dangerously" is a great 1983 film by Australian director Peter Weir about an Aussie  journalist (Mel Gibson) covering political turmoil in Indonesia during the reign of Sukarno. He gets caught up in the chaos of an abortive Communist revolution and manages to escape, barely, with his life.

Detailed analysis of the pernicious effects of pay-TV signal theft on economic and social development in Southeast Asia featured strongly throughout a series of government and industry meetings held in December 2009 in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The CASBAA-coordinated meetings were centered on an APEC and ASEAN symposium which covered the protection of broadcast content with officials drawn from 16 governments from around the Asia-Pacific region.

With the introduction of digital TV a new way of video transport and delivery has emerged, using the Internet Protocol (IP). Video over IP is a general term to describe the use of IP in any or all stages of video transport to the subscriber (or end-customer). This has to be distinguished from the term IPTV, which means specifically the delivery of video as an IP stream to the subscriber set-top box or TV set. All digital video today that is broadcast, transported over satellite or distributed in cable systems is using the MPEG transport stream (TS) communications protocol.

My previous column for this publication focused on the oil and gas exploration and production sector, with particular reference to the increasing attention of the energy industry on deepwater and ultra-deepwater hydrocarbon reserves which now appear to be much more abundant than was thought ten years ago.

The multi-channel TV industry is more competitive than ever, with a major focus on growing business while navigating the new world of online media and digital content. This was the consensus during the CASBAA Con-vetion held in Hong Kong last November.

The CASBAA Convention 2009, the annual industry meeting organized by the Cable & Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia (CASBAA) in Hong Kong on November 3rd - 6th, drew more than 700 delegates, speakers and media from around the world.

The next Pacific Telecommunications Conference, PTC ’10, will again focus on a hot topic for many in the telecommunication and IT industries, "cloud computing". While seemingly esoteric to many, especially some in the sometimes insular satellite sector, cloud computing is coming to dominate the thinking of planners and implementers in many telecommunications and IT sectors.

by Martin Jarrold, Chief, International Programs Development, GVF

Deployment of broadband satellite technologies is correctly recognized as an imperative to maximization of cutting-edge digital oilfield applications and to considerations of cost-effectiveness – it is a force multiplier, enabling return on investment, as well as facilitating mission critical communications links.

by Robert Bell, World Teleport Association

"Bursty," as you probably know, is a term for communications traffic that unexpectedly lurches from low data rates to high data rates. It is hard to deal with because it presents two unpleasant alternatives: sizing the circuit to handle the maximum requirement, which leaves a lot of expensive capacity idle, or settling for less capacity and knowing that service will slow to a crawl during periods of peak demand. The latest shared-bandwidth and bandwidth-on-demand solutions are specifically designed to deal with bursty traffic.