New telco eyes one million potential satphone customers

Stuart Corner
Friday, 09 July 2010 17:18

IT Industry - Strategy

A new telco, Indigo Telecom, has entered the market to fill what it perceives to be a huge gap in delivering portable satellite phone and data communications services to rural Australians beyond the reach of terrestrial cellular networks.

The company is reselling services on the Thuraya geostationary L-band satellite, initially via three devices: an A5 sized data terminal capable of downloading at a 444Mbps, a handheld satellite only phone and a handheld dual satellite/GSM phone.

It is up against competition from the well-established Iridium, the soon-to-be introduced Inmarsat IsatPhone Pro and Optus and its resellers who also offer Thuraya services. However they have not offered the handheld phones in Australia to date.

Indigo Telecom claims that the market has been ill-served by incumbents and is larger than conventionally accepted estimates. Telstra claims that Next G covers over 25 percent of the landmass, to almost 100kms off shore and 99 percent of the population - which would leave only about 200,000 people unserved.

However, according to Indigo CEO, David Ruddiman, the reality is rather different. He told ExchangeDaily that Indigo had undertaken extensive research correlating cellular coverage maps against ABS demographic for population distribution and had concluded that "There are almost 5.5 million square kilometres of the country and more than 617,000 people [of working age] in regional, remote and very remote Australia without adequate access to reliable terrestrial mobile network coverage.

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