[110507] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Estimate of satellite vs. Land-based traffic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Frank Bulk)
Wed Jan 7 10:06:56 2009
From: "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk@iname.com>
To: <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <496460E4.3070304@cisco.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 09:06:42 -0600
Reply-To: frnkblk@iname.com
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
I lived in a Caribbean country where, at the time, most of their LD traffic
was over satellite. While people didn't like it, there were times that
there was no public off-island access for a few hours at a time. It's just
a fact of life, and people get used to it. Those who don't buy a satellite
phone.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Donner [mailto:pdonner@cisco.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 2:00 AM
To: Sean Donelan
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Estimate of satellite vs. Land-based traffic
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.
>
>
