Spacenet Beefs Up Arby’s Broadband

Arby’s, a U.S. fast food restaurant chain known for its thinly sliced roast beef sandwiches, is among the latest franchise businesses to adopt satellite broadband VSAT (very small aperture terminal) services to facilitate communications between corporate headquarters and dispersed locations. Arby’s parent RTM Restaurant Group selected the Petah Tikva, Israel-based Gilat Satellite Networks’ [Nasdaq: GILTF] U.S. subsidiary Spacenet to provide broadband VSAT service to 1,049 restaurants, including 773 Arby’s locations, across 21 states.

The five-year commitment calls for Spacenet’s Connexstar Enterprise service to be deployed at the restaurant locations for a range of applications that include credit authorization, point-of-sale and store polling, as well as intranet-based back office applications.

A number of restaurants are opting to put all of their “mission-critical” front and back office applications on the Internet, said Fritz Stolzenbach, director of marketing at Spacenet. The key is to provide high-speed connectivity to all of a restaurant chain’s locations nationwide. Satellite is the only technology that meets that requirement.

“Two-way satellite broadband has become a field-proven technology to connect restaurants nationwide to their respective corporate headquarters,” Stolzenbach said. –Paul Dykewicz

(Fritz Stolzenbach, Spacenet, 703/848-1175)