Intelsat announced today the launch of its Broadband VSAT service in the Indian Ocean Region, which includes coverage of most of Asia. After having successfully deployed this service in the Atlantic Ocean Region, Intelsat is now addressing the high growth Asian market with its new offering. Broadband VSAT is an advanced bandwidth-on-demand system, allowing corporate network and Internet service providers to offer cost-effective and rapidly deployable high-speed communications solutions to their multinational customers.

Intelsat’s Broadband VSAT service provides high-speed connectivity for a wide range of network topologies, such as star, mesh and hybrid solutions, to support customers’ wideband application needs, including VPNs, WAN/LAN interconnections, video-conferencing, voice over Frame Relay or IP, tele-education and tele-medicine. The system can also meet the burgeoning demand for Internet backbone access.

‘Broadband VSAT has been available to our customers in the Americas, Europe and Africa via the Intelsat 801 satellites at 328.5°E, and we are now offering it to our customers in Asia, via the high-powered Intelsat 804 at 64°E,’ said John Stanton, Intelsat Vice President of Sales and Marketing, speaking at the ITU Telecom Asia 2000 conference being held here this week. ‘Within the next month, we will continue to address the Asian market by rolling out the service on our APR-2 satellite at 110.5°E.

We will be providing 80% global coverage by the middle of next year when we add the service on the Intelsat 902 satellite at 60°E.’

Broadband VSAT is an Intelsat managed network offering dynamically assigned bandwidth with guaranteed quality in C- and Ku-band. The service offers virtual circuit-based connections starting at 64 kbps with maximum data rate up to 4 Mbps. By deploying these networks on Intelsat’s newest generation of high-powered satellites, it enables users to size their terminal equipment in the most economical manner.

Intelsat is managing the network control and network management functions through a worldwide deployment of control stations. The 24-hour Network Control Center is located in Washington DC, whereas the Asian network will be supported through a control station in Hong Kong, China. Other value-added services provided by Intelsat include technical planning and network sizing bandwidth management and billing record generation.

For more information, visit the Intelsat web site at www.intelsat.int.

Contact: Susan Gordon
susan.gordon@intelsat.int
+1 202 944 7500 (Washington)

Anita Ko
anita.ko@oglivy.com
+ 852 2884 8529 (Hong Kong)