Internet via satellite with high bandwidth and low cost

The internet penetration growth curve is still on the steeper side: people require more and more affordable and fast connection to the internet, independently from where they are. The key characteristics of what is expected by an internet connection are speed, affordability and reliability. Through the European telecommunication satellites that use Ka-band technology, internet via satellite with high bandwidth and low cost is becoming a reality. On the other side, competition from terrestrial solutions is also increasing through technologies such as WiMax, Hiperlan and LTE. To keep a competitive advantage, satellite-based systems have to be able to provide service packages that can be easily understood by the customers, with characteristics that are close and directly comparable to the ones available in terrestrial offers, such as ADSL. In this sense the Lift Off Project tries to bring further the innovation brought by the recent satellites investigating on how DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) can be introduced by a satellite service provider. The scope of this innovative “next step” on top of the KA-SAT is to optimise the existing services and to generate innovative market offers for satellite internet connectivity maximising the user experience while improving the ratio cost/performances. The Lift Off project identified and implemented a solution based on the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of the IP traffic on the KA-SAT network, to enable a “flat” profile offering for applications such as Web browsing and email in a market context (satellite broadband) where such offering did not exist. Objective of the project was to evaluate the behaviour of the end users when operating in the new “flat” commercial proposition and to validate the performance of the system with the proposed solution.