[Satellite TODAY 04-17-13] Thuraya has boosted its position in Latin America by extending its GSM roaming coverage to 11 additional countries across the Americas in partnership with leading telecommunications providers, Claro and Telefónica. With these new deals, the company now has roaming agreements with 356 GSM networks across Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and North America. T. Sanford Jewett, vice president of marketing at Thuraya told SatelliteTODAY.com that the latest roaming deal represents “an important milestone” for the company.

 

     “Thuraya has traditionally had strong market share in Africa and the Middle East. However, in the past few years we’ve witnessed tremendous growth for our services across Asia Pacific. We expect the APAC region will be a strong driver of our future growth,” Jewett said. “We also see strong demand for Thuraya’s services in Africa where we’re looking to expand our distribution network and are actively recruiting service partners to help us respond to the demand we are seeing from the energy, NGOs/humanitarian organizations and the government sector.”

 

    The company made a splash at SATELLITE 2013, when it launched its SatSleeve product, which it claimed was theworld’s first satellite adaptor for the iPhone, which expands the smartphone’s network coverage and capabilities.

 

     “We see the Thuraya SatSleeve as a real game-changer for our industry. Just as DTH satellite changed the broadcast industry, we feel that the SatSleeve has mass-market potential by making satellite phone connectivity more accessible than ever before. Our initial stock has been sold out within days of launch,” Jewett said. “We’re now ramping up production of the SatSleeve data edition, which we anticipate will be available in the third quarter of this year. We are also receiving a significant number of requests across the government, media & broadcast, humanitarian NGOs, among others for the SatSleeve.”

 

    Thuraya also sees the defense and energy sectors as potential markets. “Defense missions will continue to drive land-mobile services. While oil exploration activities in remote environments and deeper waters will further require the support of mobile satellite communications solutions that we offer,” Jewett said.