|
|
|
|
NBN to trial satellite
multicast shortly
NBN will soon enter the initial phases of delivering
multicast services over its Sky Muster satellite
service in a move that could greatly improve
education services in remote areas.
The national network builder has been publicly
discussing its satellite multicasting plans since at
least July 2015 when NBN wireless and satellite
chief Gavin Williams revealed them at the federal
Isolated Children’s Parents Association conference
in Brisbane.
An NBN spokesman told CommsDay that the company was
now finally in a position to conduct trials to take
place in the near-term. “NBN has been working
closely with state and territory departments of
education, and the ICPA, on Managed Education
Services over Sky Muster, including a multicast
capability. We plan to undertake a multicast trial
in the near future,” the spokesman said.
CommsDay understands that the trials could proceed
as soon as within the next two weeks and that NBN
aborted a previous plan to start conducting trials
last November — a time when the network builder was
struggling with a torrent of complaints from
consumers and RSPs concerning Sky Muster’s poor
reliability.
One source in the remote education industry who
asked to remain anonymous said that Sky Muster’s
shortcomings and reliability problems stemmed from
engineering problems caused by limiting NBN
satellite to Layer 2 bitstream access in line with
NBN’s establishing legislation. Effectively, the
service must appear the same as any other NBN
technology from the RSP’s perspective.
“It’s very hard to make satellite work well with
Layer-2,” the source said, referring to methods such
as packet spoofing and pre-caching which can
overcome latency problems.
The source said that the lack of multicast
capability had been a source of great frustration
for education providers but that the problem was
only being touched on in high-level discussions it
held with government education departments.
Multicasting greatly reduces the bandwidth needed to
deliver video services over networks. It allows
content to be delivered to multiple users
efficiently by pushing it as close to them as
possible using a single stream before dividing into
multiple streams for the final leg to their
premises.
In the interim, NBN has reserved a special
“education-port allowance” which gives services to
homes consuming remote educations an extra 5GB of
download allowance over and above the company’s
satellite fair use policy. Andrew Colley, Commsday |
|
|
-
|
|
|
