Glossary of Terms and acronyms

Rain Outage (or Rain Fade):
Loss of signal at Ku- or Ka-Band frequencies due to absorption and increased sky-noise temperature caused by heavy rainfall. This is a particular problem in Ku and Ka-band because the high frequencies mean that the wave length of the signal is close to that of a drop of rain and therefore likely to be absorbed by the drop. In effect the satellite signal can be washed out of the sky by heavy rain.

Receiver (Rx):
An electronic device that enables a particular satellite signal to be separated from all others being received by an earth station, and converts the signal format into a format for video, voice or data.

Routers:
These connect local area networks inside various organisations to the wide area networks of service providers. They are intelligent bridges that read the address contained in the first few lines of each packet and then determine how best to sent the packet to its destination based on network utilisation.