XipLink and Vitacom have announced successful deployment of XipLink XA appliances for satellite service customers in Africa and Latin America. The new optimized services provide higher capacity to Vitacom via industry leading SCPS (“skips”) TCP Acceleration plus integrated X1/X2 streaming compression, while also delivering faster refresh rates to the end user community for a better Quality of Experience (QoE).

Much of the technical solution was certified in advance with significant testing at Romantis for the TDMA network and at Datum Systems for the SCPC devices. Thus, the XipLink appliances installed quickly into the production networks with immediate positive results. Bruce Bell, President of Vitacom, commented, “the XipLink technology has dramatically improved our ability to deliver world class services while differentiating our solutions against generic VSAT service providers. Further, we achieve a double benefit since our effective bandwidth is higher without requiring additional capacity purchases while, simultaneously, Vitacom customers achieve significant improvements to their response times”.

XipLink utilizes standards-based SCPS for TCP acceleration. Some of the acceleration techniques used in the XA appliances include Fast Start to reduce initial connection latency, Acknowledgement Frequency Reduction (AFR) to improve interactive response from remote to hub site, Selective Negative Acknowledgements (SNACK) to mitigate retransmissions when selective packets are rejected and a series of other tools to improve internet, mail, ftp, management and other classes of TCP traffic over the network. Additionally, the service provider can invoke XipLink Real-Time (XRT) UDP optimizations to improve non-TCP traffic such as VoIP, Skype or other chatty protocols. Joe Zerucha, XipLink’s VP of America’s noted that “we worked closely with Vitacom to understand their traffic profiles and business needs. These needs were then matched to the proper appliance to insure an excellent level will be provided at an efficient capital cost”.