Israeli satellite upstart Novelsat, has fined tuned its self-proclaimed “revolutionary” satellite modulation scheme, to put itself back in the driving seat as the DVB-S2X satellite standard, moves to the point where major corporations can make money out of it.
This month the long drawn out fight over just which companies will receive the lion’s share of a new patent Pool for DVB-S2X will begin at a meeting in Copenhagen on the 25th, where NovelSat will certainly be one of the companies pushing for its ideas to be rewarded with a royalty stream.
At stake are the billions of dollars of satellite payments from every satellite operator in the world, who will now be able to deliver something like 45% greater payload over a satellite link, than before. This affords satellite providers either more room to push higher bitrate data streams, or the ability to lease less bandwidth while providing the same services.
NovelSat triggered the adoption of a new satellite standard when in 2011 it released its NS3 satellite modulation scheme, which it claimed could add between 28% and 90% throughput improvements, and challenged the DVB Project to legitimize this by creating a new standard, perhaps DVB-S3.
What the committee did instead was to offer a halfway house, on what many said were “obvious” improvements that could have been made at any time, denouncing NovelSat’s ideas more or less as marketing.
There are two key improvements in the modulation technique employed by NovelSat’s NS3 over DVB-S2. Firstly, it has a higher maximum APSK-modulation constellation; a 64 symbol-set over the 32 in DVB-S2. Secondly, a reduction in the roll-off, which are the guard bands required to prevent inter-channel interference.
The larger symbol set allows more data to be transmitted over the same bandwidth, with the downside of requiring a higher carrier-to-noise ratio, and decreasing the roll-off simply increases the total bandwidth available to pass data through.
This week NovelSat has come out with NS4, which it claims is uniformly 45% more efficient than DVB-S2 and which can be implemented without any new hardware at all, provided NovelSat modems are already installed.
Very few details about NS4 have been released, especially about the technical improvements made, and it looks more like a publicity stunt to put the DVB Project on the back foot come the meeting in Copenhagen.
The deployment of NS4 would be via an over-the-air update, which presumably means it could be initiated at any time to NovelSat’s present customer-base, which was increased last week with a deal with SatLink, which plans to use the technology to improve services to maritime customers.
It will be interesting to see to what extent NovelSat technology is included in the patent pool, and whether or not NovelSat has managed to get patents awarded to it, or if they are only currently applied for.