Australian coverage completes Inmarsat's global mobile satellite broadband network

Stuart Corner
Monday, 02 March 2009 01:43

Business IT - Networking

Inmarsat has completed the global rollout of mobile broadband services provided by its Inmarsat 4 satellites, by extending these services to Australia and the surrounding oceans.

This has been achieved following launch of the third Inmarsat 4 satellite and repositioning of an earlier satellite to cover the whole of Australia. Michael Butler, president of Inmarsat, told iTWire that the new service would bring a significant increase in speed and lower cost for users of these services. "We are aiming to get about half a megabit per second [downstream] but we can nail up multiple channels for high bandwidth users like media."

Todd McDonnell, CEO of local reseller, TC Communications, said that upstream speeds would vary depending on terminal size: the largest, about the size of an A3 sheet of paper would give "half to three quarters of the downstream speed" and the smallest, the size of an A5 pocket book somewhat less.

Butler added: "One of the benefits of these high power high capacity Inmarsat 4 satellites is that we have seen the price of broadband data fall dramatically to 10 or 20 percent of what users would have paid five or six years ago and users now only pay for the data they send: there is no need to nail up a circuit."

Butler claimed that, "It would cost more to use your cellphone to roam into many countries than to user your Inmarsat broadband services." O'Donnell explained: "The network has a built in very high quality voice service with 4kbit codecs. Voice support is built into all the CPE and the use of voice does not constrain data quality."

The new technology also makes installation on ships and aircraft much easier and much lower cost, opening op opportunities for low cost and regional airlines to deploy it to provide picocells for cellular services. Butler said: "It has been adopted by a number of low cost airlines, just last week Ryan Air, a low cost airline in Europe, went live with 20 aircraft to allow passengers to roam with their cellphones."

Inmarsat's business model is to provide simply the satellite connection and resell airtime via partners like TC Communications. "They bring together terminals and time and other applications like acceleration software to make the most of the network," Butler said.