Customer Data Traffic
The traffic patterns we see below in the Cat Island installation show some interesting information. Firstly the IPTV boxes (provided by the Telco) are not yet configured to shut down if the users shuts off the TV. This means the last channel watched will continue to stream even if it is not displayed on the TV. In the below representative graph from a real Cat Island customer site, we can see the IPTV stream is a constant 1.5 Mbit/s except short period when the TV was changed to an HD station and the throughput went to 3.7 Mbit/s. Of course this means that this house is watching the news in HD!
The two blank gaps in the weekly graph represent electrical power failures at the customer house.
IPTV Graph:
Port 4 graphs show the throughput of the Wi-Fi and any connected equipment of the customer. Again we see the traffic on top of the IPTV going as high as 4.35 Mbit/s. Since these graphs only represent time slices, there could have been much higher burst rates and the wide peaks above 2 Mbit/s imply that the household is watching an alternative source of video, like Apple TV or an iPad or some similar tablet device. This is of course while the TV channel is streaming to the house as well. Here the Blue line is significant.
Port 4 Graph:
In the last graph we see the day to day Internet traffic overlaid over the IPTV traffic. This customer was getting sustained data throughput, all day without stop, that exceeded the burst download speed of his previous DSL connection.
This was truly a dream come true for this customer. This is US quality broadband on a family Island in The Bahamas.
Combination of all Graph:
Every day of the Trial period the MVDDS bandwidth of every customer was measured and logged. The average throughput measured was ~64 Mbit/s across the entire MVDDS system. Of course, since this is the first MVDDS system in an island environment, there are still some minor tuning that would increase the throughput a bit more. There are the connection speed test results in the picture below for last few days. The values in bold denote a higher speed Transponder with 45 MSymb/s. Based on the radio links performance results, the users were switched over to this Transponder from another, slower Transponder without interruption in service.
Note, on February 26 the speed test was performed three times- in a morning, in mid-day and during Prime time. The results show that MVDDS part of the system works well demonstrating a “smooth performance” regardless of time of day.
NOC Data Traffic
Here we see the traffic that has been going across the MVDDS interface. This means that since the system started we have been delivering a SUSTAINED average network load of 30 Mbit/s to all customers on Cat Island.
This traffic, were it on a WiMAX network would be overwhelming the base station’s ability to deliver it. With MVDDS solution we have not even reached the limit of a single downstream transponder. And we can have many transponders as needed in the MVDDS frequency band- upper Ku-band in this case. And this is only one direction of combined traffic from the main TX site to all customer receivers. Let us look at the other direction- from all customer 5 GHz links up to the NOC base station.
Here is the uplink traffic from those very same customers. Here we see an average of 2 Mbit/s through the base station at the NOC. This means that the 5 GHz uplink connections we have created are no where near their capacity and the operation can continue to build out the system without adding supplementary 5 GHz base stations.
The next pie chart shows a ratio between data streams in the System at NOC. The majority of data traffic- Downstream Data is sent over MVDDS spectrum while keeping the upstream spectrum for return path data only.
If MDSAmerica had simply overlaid this MVDDS downstream layer over another existing WiMAX or DSL network, that WiMAX or DSL network would have seen its total utilization drop from 32 Mbit/s to 2 Mbit/s or 16 times. This means that existing infrastructure, with the addition of the MVDDS downstream overlay will serve 16 times or more customers as without the MVDDS layer.
