[110504] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Estimate of satellite vs. Land-based traffic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Donner)
Wed Jan 7 02:59:45 2009
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:59:32 -0700
From: Paul Donner <pdonner@cisco.com>
To: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
In-Reply-To: <200901070119230.32BF5B92.4731@clifden.donelan.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Reply-To: pdonner@cisco.com
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Satellites often sit at the edge of the network. The "orbital last
mile" for individual users as well as in-country (Africa for e.g.) ISPs
and Enterprise networks. When they go, often there is no backup (except
maybe another satellite connection).
Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Paul Donner wrote:
>> WRT Kevin's query, if you are concerned about a solar incident and
>> it's affects on satcom, you might want to take a look at what user
>> base (e.g. which mobile users and what impact loss of comm will have
>> on what they are doing) is affected rather than understanding the
>> volumes that are affected as this might provide a much more thorough
>> understanding of any impact. But that is merely my two cents worth.
>
> Yep, consider the Galaxy IV satellite incident. The loss of a single
> satellite had a significant impact on its user population for several
> days/month. Other satellites can be moved into an orbital slot, and
> dishes can be re-pointed; but Galaxy IV lead to some interesting (i.e.
> unexpected to some users) failures. I'm not sure how many hospitals
> realized their "in-house" pager systems relied on a satellite.
>
>
