Mobile Satellite Ventures last week announced that it is offering a new handset and new rate plans to respond to the needs of a growing public safety/emergency response market.

The new handset, according to Mobile Satellite Ventures Director of Business Development Phil Clarke, are being manufactured by MSH Technologies and include a push-to-talk feature similar to what was made popular on the terrestrial wireless side of the communications industry by Nextel. In fact, in conjunction with other equipment offered by Mobile Satellite Ventures, the new handsets will be able to communicate with Nextel and other land mobile radio equipment.

Clarke told Satellite News that the new handset was created out of the demand the company is facing for its handsets and services. “Right now, we are sitting on back orders of 300 to 400 handsets,” Clarke said. “As soon as they arrive at our door, they will be going out to end users.”

The company is also offering a new rate plan to help meet the needs of government and public safety users of which Clarke said comprise about 50 percent of the markets the company serves with its satellite communications service. The key feature of the rate plan is that is centered on a annual rate plan rather than a monthly rate plan. Essentially, what this means for the customer is that instead of getting a bucket of minutes they can use throughout a one-year period instead of on a month-to-month basis.

“From the public safety customers that we have talked to, they said they can’t predict or they can’t guarantee they are going to have a natural disaster each and every month,” Clarke said. “So they want to make sure they have the ability to use our service when the emergency arises. We tried to address that need with our new rate plan service.”

Clarke added, “The new rate plan is going to be available to be available to all of our customers, though we are targeting new customers right out of the gate. And what is going to help [sell this rate plan] is that it is going to help a lot of our government and public safety customers that work off of an annualized or fixed budget.” Mobile Satellite Ventures said it will be able to arrange the billing cycle to coincide with a customer’s billing cycle.

As an aside, Clarke noted that beyond the public safety and government markets, Mobile Satellite Ventures also is serving other markets with this new offering.

“We have kind of an interesting spectrum of users,” Clarke said. “We’ll end up being used in the oil and gas industry. We have a lot of very large customers [that use us] because when they want to work on their pipeline, they want to make sure they have a network that will give them complete coverage.” Mobile Satellite Ventures owns and operates two geosynchronous satellites that gives the company coverage across North America and into Mexico and parts of South America as well. “We also end up with a lot of trucking customers, as well as leisure users such as sport fishers and broadcasters.”

A Growing Demand

Targeting the government and public safety market is a lucrative business for Mobile Satellite Ventures. And while Clarke declined to put a financial value on the markets that it targets and serves, he did say the company is hoping to add 5,000 to 10,000 units to its network this year.

One area he highlighted that is seeing a lot of activity is supplying terminals to support emergency response efforts during potential homeland security events.

For example, “We are doing a lot of work with various states at the hospital level,” Clarke explained. “We can actually go into a state and we can put in several hundred units in their hospitals and the we can go to the next state and we can keep adding new units our network. And because of the flexibility of the network, Mobile Satellite Ventures can link all the states together and then link the states to the Centers for Disease Control. In the event of a bio-terrorism activity, [all the states’ hospitals] can be connected on one talk group over our satellites.”

Clarke added that the company also has a contract with Hughes Network Systems to build new hardware for the network to meet growing capacity needs.

–Gregory Twachtman

(Linda Gustus, Mobile Satellite Ventures, 613/742-4168)