AdvancedBandwidth

High Bandwidth at High Altitude

The Aspen trees turn the color of rust under deep blue sky. I see my workspace for the next week – a 1960’s era trailer previously perched on the property – in which I move like a spider crab into a found shell and behind which I set up my satellite uplink. At 8300 feet, the oxygen content is 75% of sea level, and breathing is a little more strained than usual in unpacking my kit. The plateau looking toward Utah is home to unfathomable numbers of elk, caribou, deer and dinosaur bones. The brilli

I had been preparing for the future, and I didn't know it.

I was on a large TV production set in South Africa in March when the order to shutdown for the Covid-19 pandemic went out. We were providing the largest satellite internet connection to a field location ever arranged -- a month of daily broadcast file deliveries and 24/7 connectivity for a Hollywood studio.
• Typical web based speed test showing substantial satellite internet throughput. The outbound was intentionally favored for file transfers.

Though we closed down early, we proved that the n

24th August 2019

Sports and special event satellite transmission services using native IP and traditional transmission techniques - notes from the front lines

Things are changing fast in the world of TV sports coverage, live event production, news coverage and big feature TV and film production, and I’d like to share some observations and dispel some assumptions about methods and costs involved with bringing robust IP bandwidth to far-flung places. This is a topic of great interest to me as I have been specializing in live TV and remote bandwidth via satellite extensively and exclusively for many years.

The last 8 weeks were particularly remarkable b

Covering events - engineer's notebook

I do love it when the phone rings.

This time it was my good friends and colleagues at Cactus Films in Mexico City.

I had gone down to help with some coverage of the Mexican Presidential election, and they were back looking for some more live TV coverage on December 1, the day of the inauguration. They needed to do several live shots for a big foreign news client who wanted to use cellular bonding box connectivity - a LiveU unit. One big hitch to the plan was the number of people taking the day

When you work at this level, there’s no ordinary venue.

Things sometimes happen in beautiful but remote places.

Providing satellite broadband where there is no other connectivity, where it’s unreliable, where it isn’t working, or where it’s artificially expensive has been a niche I have been 'playing in' almost exclusively for the last few years. This I do using a system developed to push performance 10X beyond what’s considered ‘acceptable’, while cutting costs substantially relative to the usual way of doing things – a combination that usually get