ESA title

COMBO-SBB

  • ACTIVITY-
  • STATUSCompleted
  • THEMATIC AREAInfrastructure & Smart Cities

Objectives of the service

The Internet is becoming of paramount importance for society and for the economy. The Internet market is continuously booming and expanding.

Satellite is playing a key role in the diffusion of the internet. There is a gap to be covered where there is a (total) digital divide and satellite can play a key role in these areas.

Covering the total digital divide is the first mission and opportunity for satellite internet.

Nevertheless, there is another potential market to be served where customers demand and networks are not properly delivered.

The demand on usage of internet and the needs of customers are increasing.

Approximately between 25% to 40% of the copper lines are underperforming and/or unreliable. But this available terrestrial connection still delivers some capacity which can be exploited in some way.

This project has finalised a solution where satellite and xDSL connection are combined. The solution developed in this project will boost the performance of an existing xDSL connection adding also a hot redundant feature between the two lines.

The solution will deliver:

  • More peak throughput (higher than the single satellite or xDSL)
  • More average throughput and capacity
  • Keep ping under 100ms
  • Lower the overall cost of bandwidth
  • Improve user experience of the customers
  • Provide a hot redundant solution between satellite and xDSL

In summary, the market opportunity is to increase the addressable market of satellite provided internet.

Users and their needs

The product provides the final user a standard connectivity that delivers transparently all the features of a Layer3 connection and:

  • The traffic of the customer is routed to the web through a single public IP
  • More peak throughput (higher than the single SAT or xDSL)
  • More average throughput and capacity
  • Keep ping under 100ms
  • Lower the overall cost of bandwidth
  • Improve user experience of the customers
  • Provide a hot redundant solution between satellite and xDSL

Service/ system concept

Hereafter the target high-level architecture of the end-to-end system. It includes the elements necessary for the provision of satellite and DSL based Internet connectivity to the end-user. 

At this stage, we can divide the network in four main elements:

  1. “Smart Balancer”, at the end-user premises
  2. Satellite network
  3. Fixed network (xDSL)
  4. Border gateway “Smart Balancer”, at the Internet access side (Internet Provider)

The software that manages the platform resides on both the CPE and the border gateway smart balancer providing the functionalities required to deliver the IP traffic over different links.

Space Added Value

The COMBO SBB project focused on the optimization of satellite Telecommunication channels of IP based HTS satellites. HTS satellites provide the best performance/price ratio that better permit the combination with  a terrestrial interconnection. In particular in the COMBO-SBB project Eutelsat Ka-Sat has been selected.

Current Status

The project has completed successfully reaching the expected technical objectives and performed a commercial roll out during the pilot with paying customers.

The service can be purchased in Italy on the Opensky website: https://www.open-sky.it

Prime Contractor(s)

Subcontractor(s)

Status Date

Updated: 06 June 2018