APPLICATIONS - EDUCATION/TRAINING

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Education/Training

Enable lessons, lectures and opportunities for students

Schools in remote areas need not be at an educational disadvantage. Whether it’s Internet access for rural classrooms beyond the reach of terrestrial broadband or distance learning via video streaming for universities, iDirect technology opens doors for any educational network.

As more people than ever seek higher education, distance learning has become a strategic initiative for the world’s colleges and universities, and satellite communication plays an important role in education and training. iDirect’s broadband technology enables interactive distance learning that improves productivity, provides an easily accessible forum for anyone, anywhere, and is cost effective. Regardless of a student’s location around the globe, satellite communication reaches every corner so that quality education and training is assured.
Whether it’s providing an IP-based satellite solution to students abroad, or government’s providing training for their country’s citizens, education and training are vital for a country’s economic health and general morale.
Reasons for Satellite Communications

• Satellite broadband technology allows rural communities to experience the same level of education and services that are within urban centers. Satellite connectivity can be delivered anywhere in the country or across the globe. With no wires needed, satellite is quick to deploy wherever the school or training center is located.
• Satellite is cost-effective for education and training. While educational facilities yearn to break down the barriers that separate distance classrooms from their main campus counterparts, they also seek to improve the efficiency and cost of delivering courses remotely.
• Utilizing satellite enables videoconferencing, live lectures via telephone and even real-time collaborative tools, such as a digital whiteboard where content can be modified in real time, all at a low cost.

Features of the iDirect Education and Training Solution
The iDirect Intelligent Platform™ reduces bandwidth by dynamically allocating capacity based on real-time demand using a centralized pool of shared bandwidth. Platform highlights include:

• Adaptive Coding and Modulation – When rain fade and other weather threatens to compromise data quality, ACM automatically adjusts the modulation settings on a satellite router to optimize link performance. No matter the environment, students can be assured of constant connectivity.
• Group Quality of Service – iDirect’s Group Quality of Service (QoS) technology can manage traffic across multiple sites and a wide variety of end users. Group QoS prioritizes traffic by data type, site, router, application and other criteria. With this feature, educational facilities can categorize and prioritize all network traffic according to its own usage criteria. This is a critical requirement for ensuring the integrity of real-time applications.
• Security – In addition, the network allows government agencies needing a secure connection to be separated on the hub using VLANs to provide secure access between their sites.

APPLICATIONS - EMERGENCY RELIEF

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Emergency Relief

Leverage satellite communications to provide life-saving services

Success in emergency relief is measured by quick response times and the ability to access real-time Internet voice, video and data from a scene, command center, news source or weather station.
Disasters are unpredictable, which is why it’s important to have a communications plan with progressive technology that is quickly deployed in any environment and under any circumstance. Using satellite is ideal because it is independent of terrestrial infrastructure.
iDirect offers a satellite solution that provides the reliability and global coverage that you can depend on during an emergency, and the technology that can support many types of emergency relief deployment:

• Fast set up and connectivity while first responders assess the emergency
• Emergency vehicles equipped with auto-pointing antennas that can be on the air in mere minutes
• Communications-on-the-Move technology allows vehicles to remain connected while traveling to the emergency
• Supports voice, data and video in real-time and advanced services such as mobile cell sites for GSM or 3G services, or mobile TETRA radio base stations

With the iDirect Intelligent Platform™ first responders have full communications capabilities with voice, data and video whether in a densely populated urban area where the infrastructure is damaged, or a remote and isolated location where no infrastructure exists.
Easy set-up and operation is guaranteed with iDirect’s compact satellite router including a satellite modem, IP router, TCP optimization over satellite, Group QoS/prioritization and AES encryption. The routers are user-friendly and reliable, enabling field teams with little or no technical expertise to easily set up and activate the system from any location.

Global mobility can be achieved with iDirect’s Global NMS and Automatic Beam Switching (ABS). With ABS, emergency relief vehicles equipped with iDirect remotes can move across satellite footprints, maintaining seamless connectivity with no need for manual intervention by field technicians. A simple Global NMS enables the organization or network operator to manage each traveling remote, ensuring a consistent connection as it passes through separate networks around the world.
iDirect’s emergency relief solution is critical for public safety agencies, providing reliable, always-on communications technology in the event of a crisis or disaster.

APPLICATIONS - BUSINESS CONTINUITY & DISASTER PREPAREDNESS

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Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness

Be prepared during network failures

A good business continuity and disaster preparedness plan must be fast, reliable and able to provide the same functionality as the wireline network.

Many types of services need the security of alternate routing in case their primary communications link goes down. Sometimes the justification is purely commercial; a retail store offline for the shortest time can be very costly. Other services need backup for strategic reasons, such as key control points in the electricity and pipeline businesses or to keep emergency communications running when terrestrial links fail.
Satellite plays a key role in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery for these reasons:

• iDirect satellite infrastructure can be completely independent of other terrestrial communications ensuring there are no single points of failure.
• The reliability required for back-up links can be engineered to meet the business need.
• An iDirect satellite backup service is economic because the network can allocate bandwidth on demand when required, and reallocate that bandwidth eight (8) times per second to exactly match the instantaneous demands of each site needing backup services.
• This eliminates the need to allocate bandwidth for every site that might need alternate capacity, just for the percentage that might be needed at any moment.
• iDirect remotes can be part of a global IP or MPLS network, switching traffic seamlessly and automatically when needed.

Some of the world’s largest companies use iDirect technology to offer business continuity and disaster recovery for their terrestrially connected customers, relying on our advanced management systems, including iVantage and SatManage.

APPLICATIONS - INTERNATIONAL DEFENCE AND GOVERNMENT

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 International Defence and Government

Fast, efficient and reliable broadband for globally assured access

Militaries not only need secure and reliable communications to connect soldiers in the field with central operations, but also to provide recreation and welfare services for troops deployed far from home.

Militaries not only need secure and mobile communications to connect soldiers in the field with central operations, but also to provide recreation and welfare services for troops deployed far from home. Governments and Civil Agencies need flexible, secure and reliable solutions for ensuring diplomatic connectivity and public safety.

The ability to quickly deploy and manage a network that can easily scale without the restrictions of an existing communications infrastructure is essential to military and government operations. Solutions need to be highly secure and reliable to provide assured access to any need, anywhere.
Solutions Overview iDirect offers a highly reliable and extremely scalable satellite network that can be deployed on multiple satellites in C-, Ku, Ka or X-band, from a central hub. iDirect ‘s broadband capabilities provide the connectivity for all voice, video and data communications and specialized applications even in the most remote areas.
With built-in AES encryption and optional TRANSEC along with FIPS 140-2 compliance, security is never compromised.
Industrialized, light weight and tamper-proof equipment that is easy to carry, maintain and quickly deployable has been designed specifically for use in field operations.
The iDirect Intelligent Platform™ provides true mobility with spread spectrum mobile waveform and high-speed comms-on-the-move features enabling military vehicles, ships or aircrafts to broadband connectivity via very small antennas.
iDirect’s Solution At-a-Glance:

• Flexible platform supporting multiple satellites and bands- X, C, Ku and Ka
• Quickly deployable, robust and lightweight remotes for field operation
• Enabling high-speed comms-on-the-move applications
• Enhanced capabilities for IP system interoperability
• Compliant with TRANSEC, FIPS 140-2 and STANAG security standards

APPLICATIONS - AERONAUTICAL CONNECTIVITY

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Aeronautical Connectivity

Enable high-speed broadband access in the air

With nearly a billion worldwide travelers taking to the skies each year, in-flight Internet broadband is a prime opportunity, with a captive market of travelers ready and willing to pay to get online from the sky.

Aeronautical connectivity is required from a range of different platforms ranging from drones and unmanned aerial vehicles through military aircraft, business jets and commercial airlines. iDirect has an IP connectivity solution that covers all of these platforms. Despite the widely differing environments in which aeronautical connectivity has to operate, there a few features common to all of them:

• High throughput, bandwidth-efficient IP connectivity to the ground to carry data, video and voice services reliably. iDirect’s carrier class systems are respected throughout the aeronautical industry for the ability to have terrestrial-like performance for the most stringent applications – especially jitter sensitive voice and video services.
• iDirect created the standard when it comes to connecting to ultra-small steerable satellite antennas: OpenAMIP. This protocol lets iDirect communicate with all major manufacturers of airborne antennas to tell them where to point and what frequency sub-band and polarization to use.
• Small antennas have two issues:
     1. A small receive aperture means that received signal-to-noise can be poor.
     2. A broad transmit beam risks interfering with services on satellites adjacent to the target satellite.

iDirect has the solution to these issues through its highly efficient Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) modulation options. Either or both the uplink and downlink can be ‘spread’ to improve the S/N on the downlink and reduce power flux density on the uplink. The degree of spreading can be configured to exactly meet the needs of the planned satellite link.

• Mobility across different beams or on different satellites as the aircraft moves rapidly across the available footprints in Ku, X or Ka bands. iDirect’s Automatic Beam Switching (ABS) has been in service for more than five years on planes, ships and terrestrial vehicles. Our Mapserver software ensures that the best beam coverage is used at all times and that switching beams occurs at the optimal point. At the same time the Global NMS ensures that IP connectivity is maintained even as an aircraft hands over from one ground station to another on its voyage across the globe.
• Aeronautical communications implies high-speed communications capability, up to 1000 km/hr. This requires the advanced Doppler cancellation that is a licensable software feature available across our hub range.

The iDirect aeronautical solution is already in service on major airlines providing IP connectivity for passengers via the IFE system as well as in a variety of military and business jet customers.
High-speed Internet, along with emailing and VPN access, is just part of the story. Applications such as live video programming, interactive premium entertainment and even voice applications are new ways to increase both revenue and customer loyalty.

In-flight connectivity also improves interactions between operations in the air and on the ground with the ability to monitor and report critical flight information in real time. All these broadband applications hold exciting potential in the next generation aeronautical world.
Solution Overview

Along with advancements in airborne electronic systems, iDirect’s innovations in IP broadband satellite provide a cost-effective, scalable solution to always-on connectivity for airline passengers and crew in the aeronautical industry.
The iDirect Intelligent Platform™ provides true mobility with spread spectrum mobile waveform that enables aircrafts to use extremely small antennas or phased array antennas. With iDirect’s spread spectrum, airlines can not only maintain a reliable link while in flight; since our spread spectrum uses a highly efficient direct sequence spreading, more space segment is conserved, thus lowering overall bandwidth.

iDirect has also implemented technologies to deal with high Doppler shifts and frequent beam switching as planes travel across satellite footprints, maintaining seamless connectivity with no need for manual intervention by crew members onboard. Global coverage can further be achieved with iDirect’s Global NMS enabling the management of each aircraft’s remote from a single site as it passes through separate networks around the world.