Bandwidth on demand for deployed-IP users

The increased expectation for instantaneous, global communications is at odds with the existence of areas that have little or no communications infrastructure. Telephones and their supporting ground-based systems are not as ubiquitous as first-world enterprises might believe. Cell phones require some minimal number of support systems, whether ground or satellite based. Even in areas that have a considerable communications infrastructure, consider what would happen if disaster struck, as it unfortunately did in Sumatra and Indonesia in late December 2004. Restoring communications might require a quickly deployable, temporary communications system. In these situations, commercial satellite communications (satcom) has some unique advantages. With the advent of IP services characterized by short messages such as Internet packets, satcom transmission technologies such as MF TDMA provide a very effective means of quickly deploying a communications infrastructure. The bandwidth-on-demand concept uses the dynamic and flexible allocation of bandwidth across a range of frequencies and a large pool of timeslots. This is the most advanced step toward the nirvana of transmissions at any time across any and all frequencies. Commercial satcom is already beginning to provide direct TV and IP capability into planes, trains, buses, ships, and automobiles. A move to ultra-small satcom terminals for the busy executive is on the horizon. This would be one suitcase-sized package with easy setup, permitting a user to quickly go on the air. In the future, commercial satcom might use other techniques-such as bandwidth reuse, spread spectrum, multifrequency, and echo cancellation - for greater efficiency.