newsat pushing its jabiru satellite for nbn..

Australian satellite services provider NewSat (ASX: NWT) is ramping up efforts to secure a role in the provision of NBN services to those Australians beyond the reach of terrestrial networks, with a PR campaign for its planned Jabiru satellite.

The company has issued two statements to the ASX this week. The first was a rather general statement flagging its ongoing interest to participate in the National Broadband Network," stating its track record as a satellite services provider and proposing that its "unique-to-Australia teleports, located in Adelaide and Perth, and the Jabiru Satellite Program, participate in bids to [deliver the NBN] for the 10 percent of remote Australia."

NewSat has now followed this with a much more detail progress report on Jabiru. It has not indicated any confirmed plans to launch the satellite but has promised to "unveil its complete strategy, its partners and its funding plan before June 30th 2010."

The company says that, in January, it met with the presidents and CEOs of a number of the world's leading international space companies and claims that its plans for Jabiru are "well researched and eagerly anticipated," and that this international acceptance and recognition "provides further confidence in NewSat's initiative to launch Jabiru-1 in the final quarter of 2012, in advance of the anticipated National Broadband Network (NBN) satellite initiatives."

The statement suggests, however, that NewSat may not be the sole or even controlling shareholder in the project, saying only that "NewSat will undertake the TT & C [telemetry, tracking and control] for Jabiru-1 and will also be the sales and marketing arm for the satellite."

NewSat says it expects to have 50 percent of transponder capacity presold by 30 June 2010, and says that the satellite will provide coverage of Australia, South East Asia, the Middle East and sectors of Africa.

It is possible that NBN Co could be an equity partner in the project. Executive chairman, Mike Quigley raised the possibility of NBN Co launching its own satellite early in his tenure, but he also expressed reservations about the use of geostationary satellites because of their inherent high latency.

However he did speak favourably about IPStar, which provides the bulk of satellite broadband services in Australia, under the Australian Broadband guarantee.

At his first press briefing as head of NBN Co, Quigley said: I'm talking to a number of satellite companies at the moment to see what is available, what options are open and bit by bit we're trying to gather together the information to make rational technological and business choices there."

He fleshed out the company's thinking at the Government's "Realising our broadband future" forum in Sydney in December, saying " Given the size and demographics of Australia we will need to use satellites to reach the last several percent of the population. This is the only economic way of doing it.

"We believe this will likely be done with a couple of new Ka band Satellites. Current satellite designs are available that can provide capacities of close to 100Gbps. We are still doing the traffic dimensioning and costing on the fibre, wireless and satellite solutions and the outcome of these calculations will inform our choices of where the technology boundaries will lie."

Another possibility for remote Australia could be to use satellite as backhaul from a local wireless network that aggregates traffic from multiple users. This is the vision of O3B Networks which is planning a constellation of low earth orbit satellites for "the other 3 billion" people beyond the range of terrestrial broadband networks.

According to its web site, O3B's network "is designed to bridge the digital divide for emerging markets and lesser-developed countries [and] offers reliable web 2.0-compliant, fibre-quality backhaul anywhere in Africa, Australia, Asia, Pacific Islands and Latin America with no capital expenditure for a low monthly fee."

O3B Networks' founder and CEO, Greg Wyler, has already promoted the company and its vision to the Senate enquiry into the NBN and the company lodged a submission to the enquiry dismissing the use of geostationary satellite on account of their high latency.

NewSat first raised the prospect of its own satellite in November 2007 when the then Howard Government was geared up to award the Opel consortium a $1 billion contract to provide fixed wireless broadband to less than 10 percent of the Australian land mass.

NewSat argued that "Delivery of affordable services to 100 percent of Australia's land mass will be achieved by using [a satellite operating a] the inexpensive all-purpose Ka frequency."

It put the cost of the bird at $400 million and wanted the Federal Government to contribute half the cost. It planned to tip in $100m itself and to team up with an un-identified multinational for another $100m. It claimed that several potential partners had already been identified and had expressed significant interest in joining the project.

It said that the satellite would be build by Space Systems Loral, launched by Arianespace and would provide coverage of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Timor.

It renewed its efforts to the new Rudd Labor Government with a series of submissions to the Regional Telecommunications Enquiry, most of them confidential. Publicly it suggested the use of satellite technology to provide positioning for precision farming could be a key application, in addition to communications.

In that submission, the company said: "NewSat repeats its dollar-for-dollar commitment, to a limit of $200million each, with the Australian Government and is confident of an expeditious commencement of the project with a launch date in 2011, subject to legals being transacted without undue delay."

Since then there have been some big changes at the company. In August 2009 it announced the resignation of founder and CEO, Adrian Ballintine (no replacement has yet been announced) and the appointment of Lazard as strategic adviser on, amongst other things, the company's plans to launch its own satellite.

At that time the company said that Jabiru was expected to carry a mixed payload dominated by Ka band with some Ku and small amount of specialist requirement covered by X and L band transponders.

It indicated that Jabiru would be a comparatively large satellite weighing around five tonnes and with a design life of 15 years. NewSat said it was in negotiation with a number of parties for allocation of a necessary geo-stationary slot.

http://www.itwire.com/telecommunications-

(remove)

news/networks/36492-newsat-pushing-its-jabiru-

(remove)

satellite-for-nbn-role