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SatLabs Symposium Summary and Conclusions: DVB-RCS making Steady Progress
symp.jpg21 Sept 2005: SatLabs First DVB-RCS Symposium, held on the 8th and 9th September in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, proved to be a great success, bringing together more than 100 delegates from 23 different countries.
The Symposium, which featured a combination of invited speakers and accepted papers, revealed that DVB-RCS is now a mature technology owing to the good representation of DVB-RCS technology deployments across a number of interesting market segments.

Uses and solutions based on the DVB-RCS technology could be seen across a wide range of applications, services, industries and geographic areas, with interesting market segments emerging in the maritime, nomadic, land mobile and military areas.

Whilst the number and size of DVB-RCS technology-based networks is increasing significantly, there is still a slower take-up rate than anticipated and the deployment of network terminals is still in the 1,000s rather than 10,000s.

 The main recurring points, which arose throughout the two-day symposium, were:

  • The need to reduce the cost of equipment, installation and the cost of space segment in order for DVB-RCS to ramp-up,
  • The importance of DVB-S2 (and in particular the use of Adaptive Coding and Modulation–ACM) to make the business case sustainable and increase throughput,
  • The need for practical demonstrations of interoperability, emphasising the importance of:
    • SatLabs to make it happen and
    • The ongoing interest from Operators and Service Providers to participate in verification
  • DVB-RCS is an evolving technology, offering optimisations to adapt to both user and market needs.

Standardization bodies, research community and industry groups are addressing the standard’s evolution and strong institutional support is being received from both the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission (EC).

 In conclusion the symposium revealed that DVB-RCS is making a slow but steady progress.

The Symposium presentations are available on the ftp site:
FTP server: ftp.estec.esa.int
Directory: /ftp/pub/satlabs
and can be downloaded here.