Indigo Telecom launches 'World-first" automated emergency response

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 22 September 2011 05:58

Business IT - Security

Brisbane based Indigo Telecom will launch today a service designed to provide monitoring and emergency support, via mobile phones, to organisations with people working in remote or dangerous areas - such as journalists on assignment in war zones.

Indigo Telecom claims that the system, SpaceGuard "is the first system of its kind to both identify when a person's in trouble and automatically send help."

Indigo Telecom is a provider of satellite communications services that launched in July 2010 to address what it said a huge gap in delivering portable satellite phone and data communications services to rural Australians beyond the reach of terrestrial cellular networks.

The service relies on an app installed on the user's cellphone or satphone that operates in conjunction with backend systems and support staff in a network operations centre under policies and rules specified by the client, via a web portal, that govern the response to any particular abnormal situation, as notified either automatically or by the device user.

For example the system can be programmed to send an alert if the devices moves outside a pre-defined area, or devices can be polled at regular intervals. Alerts are then responded to, in the first instance by operators in Indigo Telecom's SpaceGuard network operations centre. Indigo has implemented its own SMS gateway to facilitate communication with devices on cellular networks anywhere in the world.

CEO David Ruddiman told iTWire: "We have been running a number of paid trials and we are now ready to launch a full commercial [SpaceGuard] service. We have just signed up one of the top defence contractors with 150,000 workers around the world and they want to put our software on their devices - BlackBerries and Nokias mainly, and satphones for isolated workers'¦And we have a number of media outlets with people on the ground in Syria, Israel and Libya who are using the service, and paying for it'¦We have two of the largest media organisations trialling it with a view to purchase, and a third one wants it for all their managers."

He said the defence contractor could roll out the service to 30,000 or 40,000 users over the next 12 months. "What really excites them is that we can do a virtual role call of all devices in a specific area."

Ruddiman said all the R&D and development had been undertaken by Indigo Telecom in Brisbane, where the NOC is located. At present the company has eight full time customer service staff and around 1000 end users on the system. Ruddiman said the system at present had capacity for about 100,000 users.

SpaceGuard has been is built entirely on Microsoft products "We are not a Microsoft certified partner but all the developers were .Net developers," Ruddiman said. "We are a Microsoft centric carrier. We are using Bing maps rather than Google. We made a decision as carrier that we wanted to have an entire OSS/BSS billing and CRM system in-house developed system that would be fully Microsoft centric - that has never been done anywhere else in the world."