The members of the Digital Interface Standards (DIS) Working Group will join forces with the Digital IF Interoperability Consortium (DIFI) to work to achieve their goal of common interoperability standards.
The announcement comes just weeks after the industry groups were formed, signaling the importance of the issue of standards to the industry as a whole. The standard will enable all manufacturers to build interoperable technologies that work in both open and closed network topologies, delivering the most advantages at the lowest cost. The DIS Working Group brings with it considerable work that has already been completed towards an open standard.
Drivers for an open standard include demand for higher throughput and the availability of more satellite bandwidth; the need to deploy and manage networks on a much larger scale; more flexible utilization of bandwidth and the use of higher-order modulations to improve bandwidth efficiency. The traditional analog L-Band modem to RF interface is currently impeding these goals.
Digitizing the interface between modem and RF components using the new open standard, the industry will be able to leverage the latest virtualization, cloud computing and network function virtualization technologies as well as greatly improve the performance and scale of satellite hub, gateway and modem equipment.
Read the PR here and read Via Satelite’s article on the combination of the groups and the importance of this important industry move here.