Estimate of satellite vs. Land-based traffic

Wed Jan 7 07:59:32 UTC 2009

Satellites often sit at the edge of the network.  The "orbital last 
mile" for individual users as well as in-country (Africa for e.g.) ISPs 
and Enterprise networks.  When they go, often there is no backup (except 
maybe another satellite connection).

Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Paul Donner wrote:
>> WRT Kevin's query, if you are concerned about a solar incident and 
>> it's affects on satcom, you might want to take a look at what user 
>> base (e.g. which mobile users and what impact loss of comm will have 
>> on what they are doing) is affected rather than understanding the 
>> volumes that are affected as this might provide a much more thorough 
>> understanding of any impact.  But that is merely my two cents worth.
> 
> Yep, consider the Galaxy IV satellite incident.  The loss of a single 
> satellite had a significant impact on its user population for several
> days/month.  Other satellites can be moved into an orbital slot, and
> dishes can be re-pointed; but Galaxy IV lead to some interesting (i.e.
> unexpected to some users) failures.  I'm not sure how many hospitals
> realized their "in-house" pager systems relied on a satellite.
> 
> 