NT Government awards Pivotel multimillion dollar satcoms contract

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 07 October 2010 15:12

IT Industry - Deals

Satellite service provider, Pivotel has won a multimillion dollar contract to provide Iridium satellite telephone services to the Northern Territory Government.

Pivotel managing director, Peter Bolger, told iTWire that the NT Government presently had about 200 Iridium services provided by Pivotel but about 1000 more provided by other services providers, and, Pivotel hoped to migrate most of these onto its contract.

"They have an incentive to migrate to Pivotel and we expect those to migrate over time," he said. "The big improvement for us is being able to pick up a lot of those Iridium services that are with other providers.

Pivotel claims as one of its key differentiators, its "unique call handling capability which provides standard mobile numbers and local dialing, simplifying communications and lowering call costs between satellite phones and other telephone systems."

Pivotel has also teamed up with Darwin based Combined Communications and Alice Springs based Comspec NT to provide local support to government users.

Bolger said: "We have invested in resources, training and capital so that we can provide the very best possible support and services to our customers."

Pivotel also provides Globalstar satphone services to the NT Government but the Globalstar service has had degraded performance in recent years as a result of multiple failures in its constellation of low earth orbit satellites.

That is set to change with the launch later this month of the first of 24 new second generation Globalstar satellites. Bolger said: "The first launch will take six satellites up. They ewill be deployed over the next two or three months, and you will start to see service improvements by Christmas. Then there will be further improvements as the net three launches of six satellites each take place in the first half of next year.

Bolger added that, when these are operational, he expected Globalstar to have the best voice quality and lowest latency of any satellite telephony services.

With Iridium calls are routed among the satellite constellation until they can be downlinked to the single earth station in the US. With Globalstar the satellite that picks up the call downlinks it immediately, and three ground stations are needed to provide complete coverage of Australia.

Bolger said the new second generation Globalstar satellites would also enable Pivotel to offer new data service: uncontended broadband data at 256kbps to handsets and speeds up to 1Mbps to dedicated data devices.

"The current expectation is that we wil be able to offer those services in 2012 or early 2013. The satellite launch programme needs to be completed in 2011 then there is a programme to upgrade the ground stations in 2012 and there are new terminals that will need to be introduced at the same."