Public Benefit C-Band Satellite resource discussed
On Thursday afternoon (Dec 12) K-Net staff (Dan and Brian) met with a number of people to discuss the efficient deployment and use of the public benefit, C-band satellite transponder. Industry Canada FedNor (Carl Seibel), Government of Northwest Territories (Linda Maljan, Gerry Sheridan, Jacquelyn Burles) and SSI Micro (Jeff Philipp) were also in attendance. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a strategy to see how a pilot demonstration might be facilitated in some of the NWT communities using the TDMA platform supported by SSI Micro.
With the reduction in the amount of bandwidth being made available to K-Net (12.5 mhz) on this transponder because of the sharing of the resource with the governments of Nunavut (12.5 mhz) and the Northwest Territories (5 mhz), there is not space left on the K-Net portion to accommodate the requested 3 mhz of CIR for a GNWT pilot service.
Discussions around the possible development of a shared DVB resource that included using our mutual allocations of transponder space on continuous carriers (ie. the K-Net allocating 3mhz at one end of our space and GNWT allocating the 3mhz up to the guard band space) lead to the conclusion that further meetings with both Telesat and Northwestel are required.
The need to discuss the possibility of migrating this public benefit resource across a number of transponders is becoming an important consideration for all parties involved. For the 3 parties (K-Net, GNWT and Nunavut) involved in the use of this public benefit, the ability to spread "an equivalent bandwidth to that availabe on one transponder" over a number of transponders will result in everyone being able to accommodate more partner communities and a more efficient use of the resource. We will be able to "grow" this resource and distribute the additional costs involved in having additional traffic and partners.
The benefits to Telesat are that they would be able to sell additional commercial bandwidth as the need and applications are developed using the public benefit resource as well as a much more efficient use of the available resource. This multi-transponder strategy will provide all the partners involved with the ability grow into commercial bandwidth without building new infrastructure which will be good for everyone with the increase capacity and usage.