Satellite Signal Equipment and Rack Installation

The first step in the construction of Eagle’s IPTV headend was to assemble a metal cage in a climate controlled room at the teleport to enclose and protect Eagle’s lease space of about 160 square feet. Within the dedicated caged space, Eagle installed seven tall equipment racks which will soon house the Integrated Receiver Decoders (IRD’s), IP encapsulators, IP packet encryptors and various computers and servers. These racks will also hold the large, high-speed IP packet switch which will send IPTV packets to the NAP of the Americas. Eagle selected Terremark’s NAP of the Americas because of its secure, reliable, and fail-safe connection to customers throughout the United States. The NAP of the Americas will serve as the central distribution hub for Eagle’s IPTV solution. Terremark Worldwide, Inc., (AMEX:TWW) a leading operator of integrated Tier-1 Internet exchanges and a global provider of managed IT infrastructure solutions for government and private sectors.

The equipment racks are bolted to a raised floor under which flows air conditioning. Above the racks are ladder racks that will enable cabling to be easily installed. Electrical services are connected from below the raised floor and signal feeds from the satellite dishes will arrive from the ceiling via the ladder racks. Other equipment being installed on the satellite dishes to collect the satellite signals and convey them to the IRD’s include signal splitters, Phase Locked Loop (PLL) Low Noise Block-down converting amplifiers (LNB’s) and LNB power supplies.

Update 10-02-2006

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The big dark purple unit is the Extreme Networks computer switch. This powerful switch is capable of transmitting more than 200 channels of video to the NAP of the Americas over fiber optics (the orange wires). Another almost identical Extreme switch installed at the NAP will cross-connect and distribute our signals to our customers. A Florida Power & Light fiber backbone links the two sites (teleport and NAP).

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The racks of greenish boxes are the digital IRD’s (integrated receiver decoders for digital satellite channels) and the black faceplates next door are the front panels for the signal splitters. Just one satellite downlink can feed multiple IRD’s. The super headend currently has 21 downlink feeds off seven dishes.

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The blue and white boxes are the Minerva Networks hardware encoders that take in analog or digital television signals and transform them into streams of IP packets.

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Above the encoders is the patch panel that we use for testing signal distribution en route to the encoders, while the signals are still in a video format, before they get converted into IP packet streams.

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The rack of black devices next to the encoders contains analog IRD’s for reception of all the satellite channels that haven’t gone digital yet.

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NewCom Home to Large Telecom and Broadband Providers

Eagle Broadband selected NewCom for its proven expertise. Current tenants include some of the largest telecommunications and broadband providers.

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Eagle Broadband Satellite “Farm”

The photo below indicates where Eagle will install its own satellite dishes to collect content. Eagle will utilize a two-step dish strategy. Initially, Eagle will install up to five dishes. Two of these will be larger, at 3.8 meters in diameter, beside each other and will have multiple feed-horns mounted side-by-side at their focal point to enable them to pick up signals simultaneously from about three satellites each. The remaining dishes will be slightly smaller at 3.1 meters and will be focused on a single satellite each. These are scheduled to be installed in September.

In addition, NewCom will provide shared feeds from some of their Latin American dishes to complete our full Latin channel package. The second step in the Eagle dish strategy is to purchase a Simulsat crescent-shaped satellite dish (www.atci.com). Simulsat, because of its crescent shaped design, can catch signals from many satellites simultaneously over a 70 degree longitudinal span. Eagle Broadband will also install an array of local off-air TV antennas on a mast on the roof edge of one side of the NewCom building away from the satellite dish farm. These TV antennas will be connected to demodulators to collect about 15 local Miami television station signals.

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