The MPLS VSAT Difference

At 123,000 miles satellites and their terrestrial counterparts, Very Small Aperture Antennas or VSAT, provide a uniform coverage of service over large multi-national regions.

When combined with Multi Protocol Label Switching, MPLS, you have a powerful solutions' solution which provides express railroad serves between two points. Like all express tracks Class and Quality of Services can be guaranteed all the way. This dedicated path has only two points of entry controlled by the client.

A Client’s only interface is a provided jack, called a biscuit, which acts as the client’s Network Interface. A client can use IP, Apple Talk, X.25, or any other protocol because the network does not act on the client's packet but only transfers it to the other end of the path. Security and integrity of the network is kept because no client has direct access to the MPLS network.

MPLS VSAT creates paths with dedicated bandwidth. The clients' access to their path is determined by their class of service, or CoS.

CBR service is much like the previously described CIR where a path is always their wither or not it is needed.

VBR service builds and tares down a path as needed.

UBR service forms paths on fair waited scheduling scheme, which provides a path’s needed bandwidth in a fair manner insuring all UBR paths have equal access each millisecond.

With T1s and DSL the access medium to the network is point-to-point. All the bandwidth is there all the time for the client to use, the only limit is in the technology and provisioning.

With Normal VSAT and Cable modem service the access medium to the network is shared. Multiple users must share service splitting the bandwidth among them selves.

A committed information rate, or CIR, can be assigned to a single user. This CIR reserves bandwidth for a particular user that others may not use.

Satellites’ transmissions cover a large territory allowing for distributed Hubs. This has several effects including:

Traffic can be landed on the coast closest to it’s end point
Traffic from one coast can be protected from weather and disaster by the other
Traffic from the Pacific Rim , EMEA, and NA can be intergrated on a one network
Pacific Rim traffic can be transferred to Africa and Europe over major birds in two hops via the US

Each Global Fusion VSAT Hub is comprised of three major parts:

Hub Chassis– Providing Timing and RF Switching
Universal Line Card – Providing RF Modulation and Demodulation
Protocol Processor – Providing Traffic Management and Line Card coordination

Each Line Card is connected to a Protocol Processor by independent Ethernet connections. Since only Power and RF is fed by the chassis and two antennas under the same footprint provide the same RF signal, Line Cards in two deferent chassis connected to the same protocol processor by an MPLS VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Services) can be part of the same system. While only one out-route may be provisioned per system, making it impractical to split east and west coast traffic on the same system, it is possible to place a set of spare Line Cards in a foreign Chassis thousands of miles away. In addition with improvements in RF over fiber technology it is possible to switch between antennas just as far apart.