ACSUL | SCPC

SCPC

SCPC (Single Channel Per Carrier)

Possessiveness is a basic human instinct. One really doesn’t like to share resources. You want your own PC. You want a dedicated LAN connection. You want your own home page. You want your own telephone. Well the list is long. But this is in direct contradiction to the fact that Networking was born and has evolved on the philosophy of resource sharing, first across premises and eventually across geographies. So we are going to talk about two things –

1: Dedicated resources in a shared environment and
2: Shared resources in a dedicated environment.

This means that if you don’t want to travel in a bus you can buy a car (it’s your dedicated resource), but you cannot buy the road (it’s a shared resource).

Let’s come to the point directly. We are talking about Satellite Communication. Today there is a plethora of products and technologies available in the market place. It is indeed a formidable task to select the appropriate technology. The even more difficult task is to select the appropriate product. This documents aims to demystify the concepts involved with an established technology – the Single Channel Per Carrier or SCPC technology.

The service provider providing SCPC connectivity services has a deep resemblance to a Courier company. After all it is also a service provider. We ask the service provider much the same questions as we do while selecting a Courier company. Now since we all are familiar with Courier business, lets take a close look how the business operates, how the customer’s interests are taken care of and what are the trade-off involved.

SCPC provides clear channel communication. To understand this lets the situation where you have to send large equipment. Now then there are two ways to send it. You either send it as a single piece or you disassemble it into small parts and then send it. In the later option you have to first disassemble the equipment, send adequate information with each component to that it can be re-assembled in the proper order. Now if one of the components does not arrive in time then the whole consignment waits till it arrives. The former case represents clear channel communication and the later represents packetised data/voice transmission.

The Courier Company picks up the goods from your premises and delivers to you premises in another location and thus it provides end-to-end delivery. Similarly SCPC provides end-to-end data, voice and video connectivity. Its just not sufficient to deliver the information, it should be delivered at the earliest. Now there are two ways to it. If you observe the geographic distribution of your organization, you can surely identify locations between which you transfer goods very frequently. So the Courier Company can reserve a definite space in their flights to carry your goods everyday. If your goods volume is very large then you can ask the Courier Company to reserve a flight for you. At the same time once the flight is dedicated to you, any type of goods can be sent through. However if you don’t load the flight fully, then you are at loss as the cost of operating the flight still remains the same. But there is a way to optimize or distribute the cost. Use the flight to cove all your locations sequentially, taking a pair at a time.