Castor offers up- and downlink services allowing customers to use their strategically located teleport facilities, terrestrial backbone network, fiber based Internet connectivity with the Amsterdam Internet Exchange and support services without the required investments and costs to set-up and maintain such an infrastructure. Castor guarantees 99.95% availability for overall performance of each individual RF uplink from its Teleport. This is achieved because all components in the antennas supporting Customer services are N+1 redundant with automatic switch-over. For this automatic switch over function Castor asked INCAA to develop hard- and software components of a Satellite Uplink Switchover System.
The system consists of a 19 inch rack with a 230 Volt PSU, a processor module, an ISDN modem and digital I/O modules. These I/O modules, called DIRO, have 4 digital inputs and 4 digital relay outputs. If an input changes the ISDN modem sets up a communication channel by calling a preprogrammed telephone number of a similar system and updates the corresponding relay output of that system. Then the remote Satellite Uplink becomes active and the local uplink shuts down. Alternatively the system can be called by a remote system. In this case it copies the received status of the remote systems digital inputs to its outputs.
The number of I/O’s is extendable by plugging more I/O modules into the cabinet. The system automatically recognizes this and configures itself for the new number of I/O’s.
