IP Routers in the sky
Cisco announced more details on its plans to bring IP routers to the world of satellites (or shall we say ’solar system of satellites’?). At its Cisco Live user conference last week, the company said that it was about to launch a trial run of its Internet Routers In Space (IRIS) program with the defense department.
The company has a smaller test IP router in space already, but it is ramping up to try and a make a real, next generation market for itself (a so-called “market adjacency” if you prefer John Chambers’ term). It will launch a specially built IP router integrated into a communications satellite from operator Intelsat. The launch is scheduled for the end of this year. IDG News Service reports that the Intelsat satellite, the IS-14, “was originally was set to go up in the first quarter of this year, but the date was pushed back by overall launch delays at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida … Once IS-14 is in orbit, the U.S. government will experiment with the router for three months, after which carriers and private enterprises will test it for about a year.”
The router will be built for redundancy (it would be a bit hard for the router to get an onsite service call should it fail). It therefore includes two routers and two modems for remote servicing. It measures about 24 inches by 18 inches by 18 inches and is expected to have a throughput of about 100Mbps. That’s small potatoes by land lovers’ standards, but is “unprecedented in orbit,” Cisco says. And, you’ll be interested to note that it will include Cisco’s full IOS software. It was also built to sip lightly on the power supply as the satellite must operate on 5,000 to 7,000 watts of power from its solar panels and can only spare a few of them for the hitchhiking router.
While the military is the first user, Cisco expects to sell more routers to more satellite operators who will in turn be able to offer new and exciting services to land-bound business and consumers. One of those will be … you guessed it … video. IRIS can support high-bandwidth two-way video communications, Cisco says.
If 100Mbps routing in space isn’t enough to make you see stars, maybe you’ll drool over this news. My colleague Michael Cooney reports that the US Navy has signed Boeing to a five-year, $42.9 million to upgrade and support the Gigabit Ethernet networks it is building on its guided missile destroyers. The Navy’s Gigabit Ethernet Data Multiplex System (GEDMS) upgrades the current 100Mbps fiber-based backbone network to a 1Gbs redundant Ethernet mesh. It only seems reasonable. Really, what’s a destroyer without some big bad bandwidth?
