intelsat unit to supply commun svc to australi

Interesting read below, if nwt lands one of these it should shoot for the stars...... can't wait for some news to explain the interest in this co

Of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In what is believed to be the first major deal reserving long-term capacity on a
commercial satellite for a government customer, a unit of Intelsat Ltd. has signed a $167
million contract to provide communication services for Australia's military.
The agreement is an important element of Intelsat's bid to expand its share of the
fastest growing part of the commercial satellite industry: supplying bandwidth to the
Pentagon, other federal agencies and foreign governmental entities.
The arrangement also could set a precedent for how the U.S. military will acquire
commercial satellite capacity in the future, particularly with increased deployment of
U.S. and foreign troops in Afghanistan.
As the operator of the world's largest commercial satellite fleet, Bermuda-based
Intelsat already has a robust government business. But instead of continuing to provide
services to such users on a short-term, spot basis as has been the traditional pattern,
the arrangement announced Monday establishes an important new benchmark.
It dedicates part of a big satellite that is still under construction for use by the
Australian Defense Force for 15 years.
The company said the satellite, another portion of which it hopes to lease in the same
way, is expected to be launched in 2012. The majority of the satellite's capacity,
however, will be marketed to corporate customers under the usual terms.
"This is strategically important to us," Intelsat Chief Executive Dave
McGlade said in an interview, noting that revenues at Intelsat General Corp., the
company's governmental-services unit, rose 23% in the last quarter.
Mr. McGlade and his managers have worked hard in recent years to improve relations with
government customers internationally, and to offer new ways to help meet the
Pentagon's communications requirements. He said Intelsat officials also have
broached the idea of supplying imagery "and other types of sensors" to the U.S.
military by using commercial platforms.
Mr. McGlade told an industry conference a few weeks ago: "There is no longer a
bright line between spacecraft owned by the government and the commercial sector."
Government customers such as the Pentagon, the United Nations and the French Ministry
of Defense are expected to boost their contracts in coming years with various global
commercial-satellite firms.
Monday's announcement also confirms earlier reports that Intelsat, which is
headquartered in Washington D.C., is the initial customer for a new, less-costly family
of communications satellites slated to be built by Boeing Co. (BA).
Intelsat last month agreed to lease capacity on an existing satellite to serve the
French military, and the company moved another of its satellites into a new orbit
covering Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to increase capacity to distribute video and
surveillance data from the Pentagon's unmanned reconnaissance aircraft patrolling
the region.
But the Australian contract seeks to fundamentally change the way public dollars are
used to lease commercial capacity in orbit. Called "piggyback payloads,"
because they supplement traditional commercial satellite services, such arrangements
envision a collection of transponders set side specifically for government uses.
The advantage for the Pentagon, for example, is that such projects typically are less
expensive, take less time and are less technically complex than government-owned and
operated satellites. But the concept has been hampered by Congressional funding
constraints and bureaucratic inertia.
The Pentagon is expanding its own fleet of communications satellites, but Defense
Secretary Robert Gates recently killed a multibillion dollar program to build and launch
a new generation of Air Force satellites with greatly enhanced capabilities.
Commercial satellites operated by a number of U.S. and foreign companies currently
provide about 80% of the U.S. military's space-based communications capacity, and
that overall percentage isn't expected to change significantly in the next few
years.