Ipstar Satellite's curious choice of Australian distributor

by Stuart Corner

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Page 1 of 2 ! Thailand's Shin Satellite, operator of Ipstar the world's largest commercial communications satellite has appointed a little known Australian company whose revenues in the last six months were just $303,000 and that is on the verge of insolvency a 12 year contact to be the exclusive national operator of IPStar services for Australia. The company, ETT Limited (ASX: ETT) will be responsible for the wholesale supply of Ipstar products and services to both existing and new service providers from 1 January 2008 onwards. As part of the deal it has commited to purchasing 131,500 Ipstar terminals over the life of the contract, to generating traffic loads of 3.5Gbps and to delivering total revenues of $665 million. Ipstar put in place a similar arrangement for New Zealand, in March, with the appointment of BayCity Group as its exclusive national service operator. ETT is not presently able to fund its commitments under the agreement and has initiated a one for one rights issue to raise approximately $6.6 million. The offer is fully underwritten and the proceeds will be used to acquire the rights to be the national service operator in Australia for the Ipstar satellite network and for working capital for the operation of the NSO. The agreement is with Shinsat's Australian subsidiary, Ipstar Australia, whose general manager, Teerasak Sawekpun, said: "ETT has indicated its interest in Ipstar business over the last 18 months and has since put together a promising business case around the Ipstar technology. It has also built a strong relationship with existing major Ipstar service providers who will turn to be ETT's retail arm after [ETT] taking over the service distribution responsibility from Ipstar Australia." Ipstar currently has nine service providers in Australia with a combined client base in excess of 20,000. It has been operational for over two years.   Its web site lists its service provider as being ACTIV8me, Westnet, SkyMesh, DCSI, Halenet, BBW Telecom, Clear Networks and BlueMaxx. ETT chairman, Larry Shutes said: "We will supply satellite broadband to consumer and corporate customers across Australia with a particular focus on the more than one million regional Australians who have limited or no landline broadband access." He said that, over the past eighteen months considerable effort had been placed on consolidating and developing ETT's core operations, products and relationships with the objective of becoming "the premium provider of alternate electronic and IP based communication and transaction services in Australia." << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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