Asia-Pacific
As with the Americas and Europe, the Asia-Pacific is a hotbed for satellite applications. Top sellers include satellite broadband, business communications, DBS, distance learning, telemedicine and rural telephony, for countries both large and small.
A case in point: Alcatel has signed a deal with Jiangsu's Nanjing Toptry China-Spacenet to support this Chinese ISP's "DSL in the sky project." Under the multimillion dollar deal, Nanjing Toptry will provide broadband access and e-learning via satellite to businesses and schools across rural areas of China. Alcatel is to supply a turnkey solution including a satellite gateway, customer premises equipment and a network management platform. Similarly in Hong Kong, Speedcast Ltd. is launching two-way broadband satellite service to Asia. Using Viasat's Linkstar VSAT equipment, Speedcast will provide users with broadband service at an impressive 1.5 Mbs, plus Virtual Private Network channels for businesses.
In South Korea, Scopus Network Technologies helped Korea Telecom deliver FIFA 2002 World Cup soccer coverage via satellite. Over 200 channels were broadcast live from 10 different stadiums during the 2002 World Cup "Final Draw," then routed via fiber optic cable to Korea Telecom's International Broadcasting Center in Seoul. From here, the broadcasters' feeds were sent by fiber to three earth stations, and uplinked to satellite for worldwide distribution. Scopus provided the end-to-end MPEG-2 digital compression equipment that made these broadcasts possible.
At the other end of the Asian population scale is the Kingdom of Tonga, which is comprised of 170 islands in the South Pacific. Not surprisingly, linking all of these islands by landline is hardly practical. This is why the Kingdom chose Globecomm Systems in 2001 to design and deploy a satellite network to deliver data, Internet access, entertainment and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cell phone services nationwide. According to Tonga's Crown Prince Tupouto'a, who spearheaded this project, his goal is to "establish for the Kingdom of Tonga a communications network that will fundamentally change the social and economic fabric of the nation and provide the impetus for taking 21st century Tonga into the new world economy."
To deliver a workable solution within Tonga's small market, Globecomm Systems decided to host Tonga's satellite network at the company's Los Angeles operations center. By using satellite, Globecomm Systems now remotely switches and manages traffic on all serviced Tongan islands. This approach won the company the 2003 GSM Technology Innovation Award for Best Infrastructure from the GSM Association.
Tonga's leap into modern communications is all the more impressive, when one realizes that the island was once famous for "tin can mail." The name referred to the practice of sealing letters in tin cans, which were then taken by swimmers to passing ships. It was only in 1998 that the Kingdom established its domestic satellite system (DOMSAT) national telephone service, which was only made possible by satellite. Before DOMSAT, Tongans had to rely on Morse code and two-way high frequency radio systems.
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