The result is economical and flexible bandwidth sharing with any mix of voice, FAX, video and data traffic. DAMA optimizes the use of satellite capacity by automatically allocating satellite resources to each active node upon demand.
Users typically pay for satellite capacity used, plus a network maintenance fee.
In a DAMA system, the network allocates communications bandwidth to each call from a pool of frequency channels on a demand-assigned basis. Circuits remain active only as long as needed, then are broken to free bandwidth for other users. When the call is completed, the NCS is informed by the remote terminals and the freed bandwidth is returned to the frequency pool. By using a DAMA system a single transponder can support several thousand subscribers. The hardware, together with the NMS, serves as the single focal point for system level control within the satellite communications network.