A Vote for Satellite
Brazil has a long history of innovation in electronic balloting for elections. The better part of a decade has passed since the country moved away from paper ballots and moved to electronic voting machines. The lag time to collect all of the votes was reduced from nine days to less than a day. Using laptop computers and satellite phones, the data in the voting machines was transferred at speeds up to 9.6 kilobits per second (kbps). Although the system was a huge improvement over paper ballots, the whole country had to endure a 12-hour wait until the results were officially posted the next day.
In 2008 Brazil’s Tribunal Superior Eleitorial (TSE) issued a tender looking for an efficient, secure, and cost effective satellite solution which could be used to transmit election results from 1,125 remote locations. Tesacom, a StratosELITE partner based in Argentina, was awarded the contract but only four weeks remained until the election. Testing began immediately and BGAN terminals were deployed to every voting center. Shortly after the polls closed, each voting center sent in their results. Although it took only a few minutes for all 1,125 voting centers to transmit their data via their BGAN terminals, the results had to be certified, a process still done by human election judges. Four hours after the polls closed, the results were certified and announced at 11 PM, and for the first time in history Brazil new the results the same day as the election.
"For years, BGAN from Stratos has offered customized service delivery, performance and productivity to many demanding organizations worldwide," says Stratos President and CEO Jim Parm. "It was gratifying to demonstrate how BGAN and Stratos value-added services helped support a high level of electoral efficiency and fairness for all in Brazil."
The State of Amazonas in northeast Brazil is extremely rugged and remote. It is the largest state in the country and covers 1.5 million square kilometers. The Amazon is a challenging area to provide telecommunication services. It is just as challenging to provide educational services to the citizens who live there.
The population of Amazonas is relatively poor. Lacking the access to educational opportunities afforded to students in other Brazilian states, the Secretariat of Education and Learning Quality for Amazonas developed an initiative to enhance Amazonas high school students’ exposure to math and Portuguese. The SEDUC network, which is provided by Hughes Brazil, initially included 100 schools but was expanded to 400 schools throughout the last several years. Educational programming is delivered via high speed data streams using IP. A 500 kbps return channel allows the teacher to receive visual feedback from the remote classrooms. Prior to the SEDUC network deployment, the passing rate for students hovered at 60 percent and the failure rate was almost 13 percent. After the network was deployed, the passing rate jumped 17 percent and the failure rate dropped in half. Based on the success of the SEDUC Network, it was recognized as one of the top six networks in the world and received a gold medal in the IMS Global Learning Consortium’s annual competition for the high impact use of technology to support and enhance learning.
Gustavo Silbert, CEO of Brazilian satellite operator, Star One, sees the broadband market as a winner in the largest country in South America as well. "A potential market for us is social inclusion with broadband. Last year, Embratel won a very big project in Brazil to bring broadband access to 12,000 schools. They are using our C1 capacity to provide this broadband solution. Silbert sees satellite broadband as a risk, but the reward is worth the effort. "It is a risk if you consider satellite broadband a mass-market solution the way you see with some Ka-satellite operators in the United States. If you have satellites just for broadband solutions, costing $400 million to $600 million on a solution like that just for Latin America, it would be a huge risk. In most of the countries, you see the mobile operators are deploying broadband solutions very fast."
Governments of all sizes have come to realize that satellite technology offers a host of many benefits and market opportunities in the government sector for satellite equipment and service providers will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
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