[c-nsp] Hughes v iDirect

[Ryan Wilkins]

I maintain an iDirect hub for one of our customers, and while it runs pretty well I have one beef that I wish they'd fix.  The only dynamic routing protocol they provide is RIP.  I've asked about OSPF support and was told that they'd never support it.  Otherwise, it has its quirks just like any other system.  No real show stoppers though for our use.

Our customer makes extensive use of VoIP (capable of 115 simultaneous calls at G.729) and also makes extensive use of both sending and receiving live streaming video.  Be careful of how much traffic you want to run through each remote, though.  The remotes, and hub line cards for that matter, are ARMv5 powered so they're not packet pushing power houses.  I think the hub line cards can push anywhere from 11 to 22 Mbps depending on software version and other options.  The remotes can push traffic back to the hub at significantly less though.  We had an event a couple years ago where the customer was trying to push 5-6 Mbps worth of voice and video out of the remote location to the hub and had the CPU pegged at 100% around 4.2 Mbps as I recall with V7 software.  V8 software supposedly increases the bandwidth limit by double.

If you want to make use of a lot of VoIP on the system with small packets, you run the risk of killing your available horsepower quickly.  I've never seen a published packet per second figure for the 7350 remotes that we use but unofficially that answer is somewhere around 1800 PPS as stated by a senior member of the iDirect engineering team.  To support the large call volume and still have processing power left over, we had to employ packet aggregators from DTech Labs.

To touch on training, they offer training the US as well as some other popular locations worldwide.  London and Dubai come to mind.

Overall, I think the iDirect solution is pretty solid.


Ryan Wilkins


On 15/07/2010 10:16 PM, Felix Nkansah wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am evaluating which of these satellite offerings provide the best IPoVSAT
> technology.
> 
> The network would heavily use IP Voice and IP Video conferencing among the
> VSAT connected locations in a hub/spoke fashion.
> 
> My client (a government agency) intends on installing/managing their own
> VSAT hub based on either Hughes or iDirect.
> 
> I wanted to know which of these providers ensure the best performance of IP?
> 
> Felix