Linkworks, PanAmSat to start 'bandwidth on demand' service

By CHRIS BARTON

Linkworks has teamed up with satellite operator PanAmSat to provide a "bandwidth on demand" service for New Zealand and Australian businesses starting in late November.

The Porirua-based company which makes the equipment to receive the service is currently acquiring a site in Wellington to build an earth station. The land will house a 4.5m satellite dish and control hub which will feed on-demand satellite data circuits to businesses here and across the Tasman.

Linkworks vice president of business development Keith Ramsay said users will pay for the circuits on PanAmSat's PAS-2 satellite on a kilobit per hour basis. Two-way data rates from 64 kilobits per second and up to 8 megabits per second delivered over a Ku-band will provide applications such as video conferencing, telemedicine, data networking and internet.

Businesses wanting to use the service will have to install 1.8m dishes and Linkwork's NetworkAdvantage equipment at their premises costing about $15,000 at each end. Ramsay said the gear can either be bought outright or leased.

Ramsay said pricing was likely to be around 12 cents per kilobit hour - meaning a two way 64Kbps service would cost $15.36 per hour. A customer buying such a service for five hours per day, five days per week would clock up a monthly charge of $1,536.

"The thing to remember is that this charge is for anywhere in the Australia and New Zealand footprint of PAS-2," said Ramsay.

He said the system overcomes one of the main problems with satellite networks - the high cost of having to buy bandwidth 365 days a year, 24 hours a day whether the link is in use or not.

Ramsay said the Linkworks system to manage satellite bandwidth had been three years in development and had been helped by a $100,000 research grant from Technology New Zealand. Ramsay and vice president of engineering Don Peat, established Satelink which they sold in 1995 to United States satellite communications maker EFData for a seven-figure sum.

Linkworks

PanAmSat