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As the market size for satellite services in Australia and New Zealand experiences strong growth- especially
for direct-to-home broadcasting - Optus is preparing to launch their next generation of satellites, intent on securing, and providing for, this expanding number of users.
The drivers behind the D-series were two-fold: firstly, there's continuity of service. One of the primary
things the D-series satellites will do is replace the existing B-series satellites, with the first of those, B1.From Feb 2007 for NZ users it reached its end of life,
The major differences between the D and B series satellites lie, firstly, in technical performance, but
principally in the D series' ability to provide in orbit back up for mission critical services and applications.
If you were on the receiving end of loosing a nights viewing on SKY in April 2006 and in May 2005 you
would be glad to see some method of providing backup for services in orbit.
The way Optus designed the D-series was to go down the path of choosing two small satellites rather than buying
one large one. It gives them the ability to put additional capacity at OPTUS’s hot bird location for Australia, at 156 - that's where the C1 satellite now is. - The D2
satellite, will be co-located with C1. D2 will have a broadcast services payload, so it operates at a different frequency band, but one which is directly compatible with the
existing C1 frequency band. The value of this is for the Australian consumers' is that it just needs to have a wide band receiver, and it can actually receive signals from either D2 or
C1..with the same installation.
The D series satellites give OPTUS the ability to add payload to the 156º orbit location, which is the
Australian hot bird location, and at the same time replace B1, which is at 160º, and that's where all the New Zealand dishes are pointing. This will give continuity of service for New
Zealand at 160, as well as growth capacity for the Australian market at 156º.
OPTUS as well has on C1 a New Zealand back up capability, so in the event that something happened to D1, the
Sky NZ could be partially restored immediately on C1.
If you have looked at the new SKY dishes, you will have seen installed dual beam LNB dishes so the
consumer's installation actually looks at both 160 and 156 simultaneously. In the unlikely event of the loss of the spacecraft (historically an extremely rare event), the services could
be restored in short time.
C1's commercial payload is predominantly used for direct-to-home TV broadcasting in Australia (with
Foxtel being Optus' largest customer), as well as for providing remote area broadcasting services (RABS) of local ABC, SBS and commercial TV content. C1 was also designed to be able
to carry multi-carrier traffic for data and voice applications, as well as having a steerable beam to provide additional coverage over South East Asia and North Asia.
The D1 and D2 satellites on the other hand, will cover Australia and New Zealand, being very much designed for
these local domestic markets.
More info
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