In a disaster on the magnitude like that of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall Aug. 29 and damaged a significant portion of the Gulf Coast region of the United States, the benefits of satellite technology take center stage during the recovery efforts. But even though Katrina did not hinder satellite communications networks, some satellite companies experienced challenges in meeting the needs of public and private entities in the aftermath, particularly in getting the inventory needed to meet the demands of emergency responders.

“We have been doing everything we can to get units in the hands of the right people,” Mobile Satellite Ventures (MSV) Vice Chairman and CEO Alexander Good told Satellite News. “We had limitations of how many units we had available, so we did some work internationally to get more units available. We had to do some pretty good scrambling to do it.” MSV has been supplying handsets to the American Red Cross, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other local emergency management agencies in the region, and even though MSV scrambled to get inventory, the company has been able to meet the demand for satellite communications services.

MSV was not the only satellite communications supplier that faced inventory challenges.

“There is a lot of demand for antennas and satellite equipment and anything we didn’t have in the pipeline or in inventory,” Chris Leber, vice president and general manager of VSAT networks for ViaSat Inc., told Satellite News. “We are having to really chase hard, so maybe some dedicated inventory or dedicated equipment is probably a good idea.”

Like MSV, ViaSat has been able to meet the demands of its customers. Among its contributions to the recovery efforts, ViaSat, along with an unnamed major supplier of CDMA networking infrastructure, worked together to adapt a ViaSat Linkway VSAT terminal for use in the region for the exclusive use by FEMA. The network can handle 48 calls simultaneously and also provides bandwidth for data applications.

For some companies, such as Caprock Communications, that lesson of having the right equipment and services ready to be deployed in the event of an emergency was learned in 2004.

“Last year, when the hurricanes hit the Gulf Region and made landfall in Florida, we started to get inundated with requests for disaster recovery solutions,” said David Myers, vice president of marketing and product management at Caprock. “At that time, we realized that in 2005 we want to be better prepared and better armed with enough equipment and supplies and have plans in place. A lot of that has really paid off. Some of those disaster recovery plans were just internal things for ourselves, which turned out to be important because we do have an operations center in New Orleans. Putting your own disaster recovery plans in place makes you think about what your customers are having to do as well, so it allowed us to put together packages of equipment and services that we could deploy very quickly that would meet most of the needs of customers of customers in this kind of situation.”

At least one of Caprock’s customers, BHP Billiton, followed that same philosophy of being prepared. The company announced earlier this year it would use Caprock’s DR-250 communications package as a stand-by communications system at its short bases for operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The DR-250 is a transportable, self-contained business communications kit that provides satellite-based telephone, fax and broadband Internet access. According to Myers, BHP’s DR-250 package was built and tagged in a warehouse waiting to be deployed at a moment’s notice and was among the first communications packages deployed by Caprock following Katrina’s landfall.

The relief effort also is drawing in some companies that typically do not serve the first responder market but are finding new business opportunities in both the public and private sector.

Segovia Inc., a company that has been providing secure global voice, data and video broadband services to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, is providing emergency services to Gulf-based relief operations, which has the potential to open up Segovia to new non-traditional markets.

“We think we are going to get a fair amount of business from the private sector, which is not something we would not have gone after, but they need communications too,” Kirby Farrell, executive vice president of Segovia said. “If you think about Fortune 500 businesses around the world that don’t necessarily have great communications infrastructures, it is not a bad thing for them to understand who Segovia is. Going forward, we hope we get a chance to serve a lot more people. If we don’t, this has been a good opportunity to explain who we are and what we do. There are going to be a lot of acquisition programs that are going to be accelerated to get Segovia-like capabilities in place so that they are ready” for the next recovery effort.

–Gregory Twachtman

(Jennifer Manner, MSV, 703/390-2730; Amy Storey, Segovia, 202/828-8819; Bruce Rowe, ViaSat, 760/476-2505)