We all know roads and traffic signals help people get from one place to another, but is your travel time consistent and guaranteed? Many factors can delay or impact the journey – from traffic volume and road conditions to distance and weather. Drivers can only make the best effort to navigate through these situations and most of the time, unless there’s an alternate route or path, they are limited in terms of other options available to them.
The same principles apply to remote communications – the kind that connects your headquarters or regional offices with ships, energy platforms at sea, mine sites, military bases, and humanitarian camps around the world. There’s a world of difference between network connectivity that offers its best effort and one that backs its commitment to uptime and quality of service with a guarantee.
Engineers call it a “committed information rate” or CIR. It means that a service level agreement defines the capacity, performance, and uptime of your service, as well as the troubleshooting and support you can expect if connectivity is impacted.
Committed Information Rate (CIR) vs. Maximum Information Rate (MIR)
What You Can Expect from Your Network
Services with CIR specify the bandwidth that a service provider guarantees to a customer, while MIR (maximum information rate) refers to the maximum amount of data that could be available at any given time.
Both are important metrics for enterprise users, as they ensure that a certain level of bandwidth is always available, even during periods of high network traffic. This is essential for applications that require a consistent level of bandwidth, such as remote communications, real-time analytics, and virtual desktop infrastructures.
Many applications, like Voice over IP, need certain bandwidth levels and may not to function properly with best effort services that can’t offer the minimum bandwidth needed. This makes some best effort-based services more suitable for noncritical applications or backup processes.
Hybrid connectivity options that use the right multipath management technologies can split traffic to utilize CIR-based options for critical applications, while leveraging best effort services for lower priority services. Hybrid connectivity solutions that integrate LEO services, GEO coverage, and 4G/5G, for instance, can take advantage of the highest levels of uptime, availability, and performance across all available paths. Speedcast’s advanced network management technologies seamlessly blend new connectivity options as they come to market, including LEO services, with multiple transmission paths delivered as part of a complete solution.
Taming Complexity to Deliver Quality
Sounds simple – but delivering it is not. At Speedcast, we do it with our Global Network Platform. It is made up of enterprise-grade physical systems: terminals at the remote sites, capacity on satellites in orbit and mobile networks on the ground, and our own teleports, network operations centers and optical fiber connecting them into a single global unit.
Over that infrastructure, we run multi-path services by satellite, 4G LTE and fiber to provide voice, video, internet, email, and the wide range of digital tools that your operations depend on. Making it all work to deliver the CIR is a set of advanced, algorithm-based management technologies that blend the multiple paths into a single, seamless, secure WAN that automatically handles beam-switching and load balancing. They ensure that network performance is consistent everywhere within a satellite beam and has the redundancy to keep working when conditions go south.
And just like with your journey on the roadway, if there are no other routes or paths to take, you’re at the mercy of the single network that your remote site is operating on. A network that offers multiple layers of redundancy including beam, teleport, and azimuth diversity, ensures options to keep operations running seamlessly for redundant and resilient service. Speedcast designs and delivers connectivity with multiple satellites deliberately covering strategic customer regions and hot spots. Multiple beams landing at different teleports means we’re able to meet and exceed requirements for even the highest levels of service availability.
Cruising on High-speed Internet
Expanding remote site connectivity options with new LEO technologies, such as Starlink or OneWeb, can help enhance the remote site experience. While those new solutions mature and expand globally, Speedcast continues to innovate with customers to address complex operational needs for high demand remote connectivity. Speedcast recently put the value of dedicated, CIR-based service to the test, deploying a geostationary-based solution to multiple marque cruise vessels. The solution delivers reliable, guaranteed service for the full itinerary of the ships’ cruise routes for an optimal guest experience. Multiple wide-band transponders are fully dedicated to the sites, with internet service that remains available at all times. The steerable beam solution ensures that the ships are constantly at the center of the beam there are operating in thanks to Speedcast TrueBeam, which maintains constant communication between the satellite and ship and enables complete tracking through the entire itinerary.
“Since joining forces as Australian Antarctica Division’s connectivity partner, we’ve been able to offer a solution to increase their network capacity 100-fold. The research stations’ systems deployments enable the delivery of a strong workplace health and safety program for AAD’s highly skilled personnel who spend extended periods of time in the very harsh, remote site locations, conducting critical scientific research efforts.”
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF ENTERPRISE AND EMERGING MARKETS,
SPEEDCAST
A Place for “Best Effort”
There is room for best effort service in the communications mix. As an authorized reseller and integrator, Speedcast implements Starlink and OneWeb services for customers at sites on land and at sea. With Starlink offering best-effort connectivity and OneWeb offering CIR, Speedcast designs and integrates the most suitable connectivity combination based on remote site requirements to deliver a consistent high-performance service. Our network management platform dynamically takes advantage of different network’s performance when availability is good, and automatically rebalances traffic to other paths when it is not. For customers, this brings the best of both worlds: the speed, bandwidth, and low latency of new LEO best-effort connectivity, with the CIR needed when safety, security, human welfare and the operation of billion-dollar assets are on the line.
So, how do you get ready for the journey ahead? A basic satellite internet connection can get you from one place to another, but it takes a managed, global, multipath service to ensure your journey is efficient and effortless.