EMS SATCOM Customer Service Team Gets into the Details of some of Your Frequently Asked Questions

Customer support representative, JEAN CLAUDE ALBERT answers the question “How can I use acceleration with SwiftBroadband?“

Early last year Inmarsat began offering its new service called SwiftBroadband. This new service allows users to use an “always on” connection known as “background service” with connection speeds of approximately 200 – 300 Kbps. Though this is a superior speed than previously offered, we at EMS SATCOM felt there had to be a way to make it better, but there wasn’t.

Until now.

One of the pitfalls of offering acceleration over the SwiftBroadband link was that users no longer connect to an ISDN line, but directly to the public Internet. What was needed was a way to have a secure link to the ground station. This would allow the customer network to provide the acceleration and decompression.

The solution was to first build a VPN tunnel to the ground infrastructure and then construct a second tunnel inside of the first to provide the acceleration. Using this method, user data can be safely delivered and accelerated to the user’s ground network of choice.

Below is a simple network diagram depicting the path from the eNfusion® CNX-200 Network Accelerator installed in an aircraft, through the Inmarsat SwiftBroadband network to the public Internet. Once there, the signal finds its way to the customer network though a VPN router and Expand unit. As of the time of writing, Satcom Direct is offering this new service to its SwiftBroadband service customers. This means that users do not necessarily need to have a VPN router or ground Expand unit to benefit from the higher bandwidth.

With this flexible new solution EMS SATCOM now offers a single CNX configuration that will allow the user to connect with acceleration not only to Swift 64 but also to SwiftBroadband background or streaming services.

For applications, such as streaming media that do not benefit from acceleration, the data is simply routed around the acceleration tunnel.

Users can also have the choice of connecting to different ground infrastructures without having to reconfigure the system. This new system set-up provides a significant increase in performance, with our tests yielding an average speed of 600 to 800 Kbps. and bursts of 1.2 Mbps depending on the amount of compressible traffic.

A Technical Note is available to help in the set up this service. Please contact Product Support at 1-888-300-7415 for more information.