Year-on-year, the earth station industry has not witnessed any growth in terms of investment. From the Rs. 35.85 crores investment last year, this year this segment saw approximately Rs. 26.5 crores. As the broadcasting sector stands on the verge of a revolution, riding on the back of high definition, a major storm stands to traverse its path. Wizened minds of the industry say that the market is reaching a slow stagnation. The industry is faced with a massive requirement of bandwidth, with hazy solutions around the corner.

Essel Shyam has installed three earth stations in India with a combined value of Rs. 5.3 crores in 2009-2010. This includes setting up of a teleport for TV Today Network worth Rs. 1.5 crores and one for Kansan Media worth Rs. 1.3 crores in Chandigarh for Day and Night news. It also did an upgradation of Jammu earth station for Prasar Bharti, valued at Rs. 2.5 crores. The company has installed a C band earth station for Mohana TV in Dhaka, value of project being Rs. 1.5 crores. For 2010-11, one of the projects underway is a teleport for Kansan Media in Chandigarh. The value of the project is Rs. 1.3 crores.

In the year 2009-2010, Indiasign undertook two projects, total value, Rs. 5.5 crores. This includes upgradation of their own MCPC chain at Hyderabad teleport with MPEG-4 HD enabled services providing complete end-to-end monitoring, and an upgradation to uplink on 4 satellites with HD and MPEG 4 enabled services for its own company.

NSTPL has also has a couple of installations, total value being Rs. 0.7 crores, one of the projects being for News 24.

There was also an earth station upgradation carried out by Globecomm Systems Inc., USA for Airtel, Bangalore, valued at Rs. 5 crores.

Around the year there is constant upgradation being done by the seven DTH operators, estimated at a total of Rs. 10 crores.

The other players present in the industry are Arraycom, Rtronix, and General Dynamics.

In an earlier policy change, the satellite services operating in the extended C-band frequencies (3.4-3.7GHz) had been instructed to migrate to the standard C-band frequencies (3.8-4.2 GHz), so that the extended C-band could be vacated for wireless services. This was proving to be a very expensive proposition, requiring upgradation and newer installations. However with no additional bandwidth available, broadcasters are continuing to operate on the same frequencies.

There has been a mushrooming of DTH operators in the country. The seven main players in the field in India are DD Direct Plus, Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV, Reliance Big TV, Sun Direct, Dish TV and Videocon D2H. With so many players in the field, the need for more bandwidth space increases drastically. Assuming that every player requires ten transponders to service their territories, there is a minimum requirement of 70 transponders. This outlines the major difference in the demand and the supply.

The six private DTH operators are occupying 44 Ku band transponders. In addition, Doordarshan has six transponders for its DD Direct DTH service. Such resources could be easily utilized by allowing DTH operators to provide signals directly to MSOs and cable operators. This will enable the country to digitalize distribution of TV signals without consuming more satellite bandwidth for HITS operations.

In order to optimize available transponder capacity, DTH operators should be allowed to carry certain channels for viewing outside India and such operators should have deemed permission for carrying such channels.

With severe shortage of broadcasting space on the national hemisphere from ISRO, operators are waiting for leased territory on foreign satellites by ISRO. This is not a comfortable option as it will incur heavy expense on the part of the operators on paying rentals. However, the growing concern in the minds of broadcasters is first, of getting the lease sanctioned and secondly of fair distribution to all the six providers. ISRO is in talks for further agreement to lease bandwidth space on two satellites, ProtoStar II and AsiaSat 5 for the Indian broadcasting sector.

HD is the buzzword

The oncoming buzz of HD is music to the ears for consumers, with new and improved services in terms of viewing experience. However, this is also a cause of great concern who are upgrading to HD, for it will create a flood of data with unprecedented data capacity requirements.

A small sample of the amount of data that can be created from a sport can be an eye opener. Soccer stadiums are becoming temples of high-tech multimedia. Gigantic data quantities flow as digital TV images from the stadiums to the broadcasters and TV companies during international contests. Telekom Austria estimates that its fiber optic network transmitted a total data quantity of two Petabytes during the EURO 2008. That is about five times the data quantity in all the books ever written. Yet a stadium does far more than just television transmissions, be they in high definition (HDTV) or 3-D. Today, large stadiums are information hubs producing large amounts of real time data that place tough requirements on infrastructure.

On one hand, the available transponder space will be better utilized by usage of better technology, while on the other hand more transponder space will be required by emerging HDTV channels and conversion of SDTV channels into HDTV channels.

Compression formats like DVB-S2 modulation and MPEG-4 advanced video coding (H.264) are slowing becoming the necessity for optimizing satellite link usage for video broadcasting and point-to-multipoint networks. Adoption is hampered by factors like legacy networks and ample life remaining of the equipment. Although the need is great, dumping 7-8 million decoders is not a very affordable solution.

Satellite broadcasting

Satellite is an important medium used for broadcasting. The characteristic of the satellite to retransmit and provide the signal to a large area makes it the most ideally suited medium for broadcasting. There are three primary types of satellite television usage - direct reception by the viewer (DTH), reception by local television affiliates, and reception by headends (MSOs) for distribution across local cable systems. The broadcasting services are provided in India through the geostationary satellites that have footprint over India. The geostationary orbit is around 36,000 km from equator of the earth.

The satellite broadcasting services are currently operational in C band [6 GHz (uplinking) and 4 GHz bands (downlinking)] and Ku band [14 GHz uplinking and 11-12 GHz band (downlinking)]. Typical transponders each have a bandwidth between 27 - 50 MHz, generally 40 MHz (usable 36 MHz.). A channel requires 1.5-2.00 MHz bandwidth with MPEG 4 compression format and 2.00-4.00 MHz with MPEG-2 compression format. The bandwidth requirement of a channel also depends on the type of content it carries. Channels having fast moving picture like sports, movie, infotainment etc needs more bandwidth as compared to those channels which have slow moving picture like news, shopping, religious, educational etc. Typically a transponder can carry 18-24 channels with MPEG-4 and 10-15 channels with MPEG-2 compression technology. C band is susceptible to terrestrial interference while Ku band transmission is affected by rain. The coordination of these geostationary satellites from the point of view of orbit and spectrum, in India, are done by Department of Space, and Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) wing of Ministry of Communications and IT.

Till December 31, 2009, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has permitted 61 teleports in the country.

In India, the uplinking of TV channels have been permitted in C band and Ku band. However, majority of TV channels are being uplinked in C band through geostationary satellite because of better transmission characteristic in this band. The DTH service is currently permitted in Ku band. The HITS policy announced by the Government recently allows the use of C band or Ku band for its operation. Apart from the broadcasting services, the satellites in this band are also used for telecommunication services such as VSAT and long distance voice communication.

There are various users of satellite broadcasting resources in India. Currently, apart from DTH service of Doordarshan, 6 DTH operators are using Ku band transponders on various Indian and foreign satellites that have footprint over India. The uplinking guideline permit the setting up of uplinking hub/teleports; and provides permission for uplinking news and current affair channels, and for non-news & current affair channels by a company from Indian soil. The company can uplink either in C or Ku band. Uplinking in C band are permitted both to Indian as well as foreign satellites under these guidelines. On the other hand, uplinking in Ku band is permitted to transponders made available by Department of Space only. Satellite to be used should have been coordinated with INSAT System. In addition Satellite News Gathering (SNG)/Digital Satellite News Gathering (DSNG) and flyaway units are also permitted to use satellite resources to link up the content with the respective TV channels. The Government of India recently announced head-end-in-the-sky (HITS) policy allowing use of C band or Ku band for its operation.

In short, the satellite resources including spectrum for uplinking and downlinking in these bands are much in demand for TV channels as well as by the delivery platforms. The need of the hour is that these limited resources should be used judiciously by broadcasting sector as a whole for the benefit of society and for the economic growth of the country.

The transponder capacity available for use in India

According to Department of Space (DoS), at present on INSAT fleet there are 10 satellites in space. These satellites have a total of 182 transponders in C band, extended C band, Ku band and S band. In addition to this, 53 transponders from foreign satellites have been hired by Department of Space. C and extended C band covers Indian main land, SAARC countries and Andaman & Nicobar, Lakshadweep Islands whereas Ku band covers only Indian mainland. All the transponders are already being utilized for various services like TV broadcasting, VSAT, DTH and DSNG. According to DOS, at present no bulk capacity is available in any band. At present DOS has a demand of around 200 transponders in Ku band and around 25 transponders in C band. In order to meet this demand, they have planned satellites which will be launched over a period of next four years. Foreign satellites like Asiasat 5, Thaicom-2, Asiasat-3S & IS-10 etc. are already being used for TV broadcasting in C-band by the users over India.

Although, the spectral efficiency for these satellite broadcasting services has increased manifold with the adoption of digital and compression technologies in satellite transmission, this natural finite resource cannot be used for providing unlimited number of satellite TV channels, and other broadcasting services. Low bit rate encoding/compression techniques have further potential to enhance the channel handling capacities of the transponders over the satellites, but again there is a limitation of orbit/spectrum resources. For example, MPEG-4 encoding techniques, instead of MPEG-2, have enhanced the number of channel handling capacities of transponders by around one and half times. With one C band transponder using MPEG-2 encoding one can broadcast 10-15 channels. Use of MPEG-4 encoding with DVB-S2 modulation can enhance the channel capacity to 18-24 channels per transponder.

On one hand the available transponder space will be better utilized by usage of better technology, while on the other hand more transponder space will be required by emerging HDTV channels and conversion of SDTV channels into HDTV channels. In addition to this, transponder space will also be required for new delivery platform in the form of HITS. Therefore, theoretically speaking the exact number of possible satellite channels depends not only on the future technology but also on the number of HITS operators who want to provide services in "C" band and the conversion of SDTV channels into HDTV channels.

There are a number of users for ‘C' band transponders. These include telecom services, VSAT, TV transmission and HITS. There are no specific guidelines earmarking transponders capacities between these services. Moreover, in the C-band, the broadcasters can directly lease capacity from ISRO or foreign operators under the "Open Skies Policy" subject to the Dept. of Space not having objection to lease of such capacity. The DoS consent is primarily based on the satellite being coordinated for use over India and the potential use not affecting other satellite users adversely.

Due to the wide footprint of C-band satellites, a number of satellites are available for providing services over India or in other countries such as for TV broadcast. Based on demand, any satellite coordinated and having footprint over India can choose to offer its capacity to Indian users in preference to other countries. Further the spot beams of existing foreign satellites which do not have footprints over India can in many cases be changed to deliver airwaves over India, if the market situation so demands. Of course this would be subject to co-ordination with Department of Space and WPC. Similarly, channels which are uplinked from foreign soil can be downlinked in India. All these add multiple dimensions to the calculation of the possible number of satellite TV channels.

During pre-consultation a service provider has indicated that there is no shortage presently for C band transponders whereas there is acute shortage of Ku band transponders. The situation in C band could change if a large number of new channels come up and also a number of HITS operators start using C band. It has also been indicated that some of the foreign satellites, having footprints over India have free transponders in C band.

Another stakeholder view is that the theoretical limit, taking into account possible satellite locations visible from India and current C-band and extended C-band frequency allocations for content distribution, is probably in many thousand to low ten thousands of channels, though ongoing technology advances mean that this is not a hard and fast limit.

New satellite initiatives

To conjugate to the increasing need, there were some new satellites slated to be launched last year. The Indian audience was looking towards the launch of the GSAT-4, to solve some of its bandwidth crisis. GSAT-4 was the nineteenth geo-stationary satellite of India built by ISRO and fourth in the GSAT series. However, GSAT-4 was not placed in orbit as GSLV-D3 could not complete the mission.

On the global level, with advanced technical features and coverage beams carefully tailored to the demands of the regions it serves, NSS-12 is poised to provide robust, world class communications services to an area that is home to two-thirds of the earth's population.

NSS-12 replaced NSS-703 at 57¬? east, and bringing increased capacity and transmission power to a key location at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia. NSS-12 delivers DTH through four regional Ku-band spot beams over the Middle East, Europe, Central and Southern Asia and for the first time, Eastern Africa. The satellite's high-capacity, high-power C-band hemispheric beams - one covering Europe, Africa (including Mauritius) and the Middle East, and the other stretching across Asia to Australia - have been augmented by a C-band global beam spanning from the UK to the Far East.

The satellite reaches an estimated two-thirds of the world's population. It features 40 C-band transponders and 48 Ku-band transponders with DTH power levels, as well as elaborate beam interconnectivity and C/Ku-band cross-strapping.

With slowly improving backhaul technologies, the concept of multichannel service providers is becoming popular, so that a single teleport can provide services to a large number of individual channels of in a more effective and economical way. The other changes in technologies are MPEG 4 compression, DVB S2 Modulation which serve to economize on bandwidth.

On key growth drivers

• The increasing number of regional news channels.
• Reducing cost of equipment
• The inadequate uptime provided by terrestrial backhaul technologies.

On USP of the solutions

They are engineered for near zero downtime. Over an extended period of time, the equipment is selected carefully and the design is kept modular to allow for future expansion/ modernization. Being a service provider for the last ten years, Essel Shyam only recommences equipment that we have tested and used ourselves. With a strong team of trained telecom engineers, all installations by Essel Shyam are backed with a long term after sales support

Projects in the pipeline

• Setting up of earth station at Kathmandu, Nepal
• Setting up of our own teleport at Kochi
• RF System for a customer in Nepal.