One-Man Reporting Band
Assuming you can maintain the call, keep an eye on it. Because when two synchronized streams begin to fall out of synch, the video might freeze, lose color, or you could see serious blocking as the codec’s trying to make a distinction between noise and motion. The less synchronized the individual streams, the more it will be interpreted as noise.
Videoconferencing is all about timing, constant timing. Throw in the variable that each stream sent out makes a 100,000-mile journey through space to get to its destination, and the timing problems explode exponentially. You can even hear it. Make a satellite phone call and sound quality goes in and out. Crank it up a notch for video and multiple streams and you get the idea of the complexity involved. The mission for a reporter using Inmarsat is to get all the data to its destination at the right time, all the time and then put it together. Good luck.
The first time Bruton did bonding was on Mt. Everest, spring of ’97. In February of 1998, CNN sent him to the Persian Gulf where he transmitted off the back of the USS Independence. Each stream went around the world in different directions to two different satellites to different land earth stations where he got them to bond up within their threshold at CNN.
Inmarsat, the wholesaler of airtime, is watching and shifting to the emerging satellite phone industry accordingly. Inmarsat-3 satellites supply the strong signals needed to make data calls over the Global Area Network or GAN. A failed call is based on signal strength, not congestion. Inmarsat has redundancy built in and when the situation arises, channels can be shifted and allocated given what services are needed. The only time the network saw increased activity was during India’s earthquake.
Mobile reporting a la CNN and Jim Bruton is possible thanks to I-3’s spot beam technology. Focusing power on landmasses, spot beams enable the user to send and receive a signal with a smaller antenna. When Inmarsat launches the I-4 system sometime before the end of 2004, it’ll have 200 spot beams. Transmission rates will shoot up to 432 kbps while simultaneously decreasing the size of the terminals.
The cost for each Inmarsat 64 kbps call is about $7.50 per minute ($15 a minute if bonding two), making it still more expensive than traditional Ku band. Those systems pump out 5.5 Mbps for an average cost of $6 a minute.
In Part II, we’ll look at the steps involved for delivering video over satellite phones and what the big-time networks are doing about it.