Historical example of commercial satellite datacasting edit

Cidera edit

Between 1999-2004 there used to be a commercial satellite datacasting service known as Cidera. Their service used a standard DVB-S transmission using DVB-MPE to embed the IP packets in the MPEG-2 transport stream. Usenet traffic was carried as a series of UDP packets to a multicast address, with each packet starting with a magic number (0xdeadd00d) followed by an incrementing sequence number. No encryption or compression was utilised. It worked well enough without any higher level FEC error correction. The total transport stream rate was 44Mbit/s, with roughly 20Mbit/s of that used for Usenet traffic. The European service was via the Sirius 2 satellite on 12.073GHz using horizontal polarization. It delivered a total of 200GB of Usenet traffic per day at the time.