Stratos has communication covered

By ADAM GIFFORD

Michael Smith explains why one of the two satellite dishes at the Albany Land Earth Station in North Shore City is almost touching the ground.

"It's looking at a bird over the Indian Ocean," says the Asia Pacific managing director of satellite communications company Stratos.

The bird in question is an Inmarsat satellite 38,000km above the Equator at longitude 109 east, its footprint a sweep from the Mediterranean to the central Pacific.

That means it is passing over one of the hottest spots in the world for military and civil communications, Afghanistan.

The pictures seen on CNN and other news networks as likely as not have been sent out of the war zone as high-speed data from an Inmarsat phone, come back to Earth at the North Shore facility and been passed by the terrestrial telecoms network to the United States.



High-speed data on Inmarsat runs at about $US6 a minute, compared to $US2 for voice.

The military, too, is a big user of commercial satellites. The US Navy is a significant customer of Stratos, as a bank of dedicated modems in a corner of the data centre testifies.

Special forces, including perhaps New Zealand SAS troops, are calling in bomb strikes using Iridium phones connected to a GPS (global positioning satellite) receiver, range-finding binoculars and a Pocket PC in a rugged case to encrypt signals and process data.

It's part of a system called Jedi (joint expedition digital information.)

The field command centre version replaced the Pocket PC with a laptop running Windows CE.

Iridium phones run off a different network of low earth orbit satellites unconnected with the Albany facility.

Stratos is one of 16 resellers of services on the Iridium network, which is undergoing a massive relaunch.

Iridium was bought by a consortium of private investors for $US25 million after its original backers burned through $US8 billion getting the constellation of low-earth-orbit satellite operations.

Iridium phones can be used anywhere you can see the sky, making them ideal for remote communications.

Stratos is offering Iridium calls costing $US1.50 a minute to a land line or 50USc to another Iridium phone, compared to the original price of up to $14 a minute.

The new business, whose owners include Quadrant Australia, is underpinned by a $US3 million-a-month contract with the US military to provide 20,000 terminals.



Stratos started out in St John's, Newfoundland, providing marine radio services. It has grown rapidly by acquisition, and in September was top of the list of the 50 fastest-growing Canadian technology companies, with revenue growth between 1996 and last year of 73,000 per cent.

As well as Inmarsat and Iridium, it handles Intelsat, VSAT and other communications technologies. It also owns telephone companies in Texas and Louisiana which are part of its communications network servicing 7769.9 sq km of oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.

%Mr Smith said that in this part of the world Stratos is looking at building a similar communications network to service companies looking for oil below the North West Shelf off Australia, through to Timor and on towards Thailand.

%"The aim of the company is to provide wireless communications to customers in remote locations," Mr Smith said.

"That means we have lots of customers in the maritime industry, in oil and gas, aeronautical, the military, recreational users."

Stratos recently bought the satellite business of British Telecom, which included the Albany facility, for $US350 million, giving it its own land network for global coverage.

"BT was the third largest Inmarsat provider as well as having a lot of value- added services."

Mr Smith said Stratos is providing free satellite air time for the New Zealand teams taking part in the Telecom Transatlantic Rowing challenge, enabling them to keep in touch during their race across the Atlantic Ocean.