Satellite Technologies

SSi offers a wide variety of services in remote communities across the World. In most cases, the locations in which SSI Micro offers services do not have access to terrestrial communications, and therefore satellite networks are used in their place. Building and maintaining these satellite networks offers many challenges that SSI is uniquely qualified to handle.

SSi has built an extensive satellite network across Northern Canada. Today, we have infrastructure in 60 communities in Northern Canada alone, most of which are in communities that present daunting challenges, including; extreme & harsh weather, remote locations, limited site access, fly in only access and long winters with limited daylight hours.

In Northern Canada, deployment begins with the selection of an appropriate site for the satellite dish and related equipment. Locations are carefully chosen, civil engineering and foundation building are completed and large satellite dishes are installed. Custom built communication shelters, designed specifically for the harsh climates are then put in place to house the myriad of electronics necessary for communications.

Once the necessary site work has been completed, technicians in our Operations Center integrate the new earth station into the overall satellite network. Taking advantage of a unique combination of products, SSi is then able to provide a host of services to the new location.

A number of technologies are then utilized to further augment basic services allowing us to deliver cost effective, high performing products to clients within the community. Primary among those technologies are:

• Full mesh TDMA network, offering single satellite hops between two locations, greatly increasing the viability of many types of communications. Voice and videoconferencing in particular, take great advantage of a full mesh network over more traditional hub and spoke networks.
• A variety of TCP acceleration techniques provide significant increases in performance across the satellite network
• Traffic shaping ensures that traffic is prioritized appropriately to a clients specific needs
• Transparent caching
• DVB overlay, improving inbound throughput
• Local mail servers, improving SMTP/POP3 response times.
• Bandwidth on demand, allowing for more flexibility and additional capacity to be allocated to clients as needed

The experience SSi has gained building this infrastructure in Northern Canada has given us the experience necessary to deploy turnkey networks anywhere in the world. We have deployed many of the same technologies successfully in Africa, Indonesia, and the South Pacific. We are confident that we could build satellite networks anywhere in the World.

To view some of the networks we have built, see our SSi Projects section to read more.