Managed network satellite services provider Segovia is doing its part to help keep soldiers in Iraq in contact with their families in the United States and other parts of the world by providing satellite-enabled Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services in Iraq. The importance of the service to the troops became evident May 7 and 8, which was the weekend of Mother’s Day in the United States.

During that weekend, soldiers made more than 100,000 VoIP phone calls totaling more than 1 million minutes. The call volume represented about a 45 percent increase compared to the amount of calls made during a typical weekend.

In Iraq, Segovia has deployed about 1,200 Cisco VoIP phones in Internet cafés used by soldiers, Kirby Farrell senior vice president of sales and marketing and a founder of Segovia, told Satellite News. Those phones connect to Segovia’s worldwide network.

“We have our equipment co-located at teleports around the globe and we are up on eight different commercial satellites that give Segovia global reach,” Farrell said. “And for the VoIP part, out of each one of those teleports, we bring redundant terrestrial landline connections back to a secure location in northern Virginia. Out of our network center in northern Virginia, we connect our customers to their own private networks, or in the case of the Internet cafés in Iraq, to our VoIP infrastructure.”

With this network infrastructure, a soldier will be able to get a dial tone to make phone calls to the United States or other locations around the world.

Deploying a satellite VoIP network is only a part of the solution Segovia offers to help keep soldiers connected to family and friends back home. The company also set up an e- commerce infrastructure to make the purchasing of minutes easy for soldiers and families alike.

Soldiers or [their families] can come onto our Web site and get a personal identification number (PIN) number, Farrell said. Once the soldier has the PIN number, that soldier can go to any one of those phones, enter the PIN and can call anywhere. For calls to the United States, Segovia charges four cents per minute with no additional fees.

“A lot of other providers focused on pay-as-you-go calling cards, but we believe that approach fails to recognize the realities on the ground in Iraq,” Farrell said. “Cards can be paid for, but then lost or stolen, leaving the soldier unable to call. We decided to make it simple for everyone” while at the same time adding a level of protection for purchased minutes.

–Gregory Twachtman

(Kirby Farrell, Segovia, 703/621-6430)