MADRID and OTTAWA – Major Spanish telecom Telefónica, one of the world’s largest wired and wireless operators, and Canadian satellite company Telesat today announced they have completed live in-orbit testing of Telesat’s low earth orbit phase one satellite.
Telefónica’s international wholesale services division partnered with Telesat on a testing campaign to explore the performance and feasibility of leveraging LEO satellites for high-end services, says the press release.
“Testing demonstrated that Telesat LEO could be a viable option for wireless backhaul and presents a substantial improvement in performance over geostationary orbit (GEO) links, without the use of compression or TCP acceleration techniques that are typically required in 650ms latency GEO environments.”
The release says speeds achieved were “fibre-like.”
Applications tested over Telesat’s LEO birds resulted in observed round trip latency of 30-60 msec without any packet loss.
Test scenarios included HD video streaming, video conferences, remote desktop connections to manage a remote computer, VPN connection, and FTP encrypted file transfers of 2 GB in both directions. The companies report all performed very well.
“As we plan, design and build our offerings to provide best-in-class connectivity for our customers, we are eager to explore how cutting-edge technologies like Telesat LEO can integrate with our global connectivity infrastructure,” said Gustavo Arditti, TIWS satellite business unit director, in the release. “Across every application tested, Telesat LEO delivered an outstanding performance, with significant improvements over what we can achieve via GEO satellites today.”
“The ability to demonstrate fibre-like performance via satellite across a number of applications that perform poorly on GEO satellite backhaul is a testament to the capabilities of our Telesat LEO network,” added Erwin Hudson, vice-president, Telesat LEO. “With its high-throughput links, ultra-low latency, and disruptive economics, Telesat LEO offers an unparalleled value proposition to expand the reach of 4G and 5G networks.”
