Search results
Tariam Delivers Free Satellite Broadband Hardware for US & NATO Forces Personnel
Global Satellite Broadband ISP Tariam has launched an innovative new satellite broadband service aimed specifically at supporting serving NATO and ISAF forces and their subcontractors operating in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The service, dubbed ‘inet’, has been put together to facilitate welfare communications for personnel stationed thousands of miles from friends and family with no way of communicating with home.
Tariam’s Military and Aerospace Director, Selwyn Petterson, informed, inet is a revolutionary offering because we’re actually giving away the hardware with the service. We’ve constructed the product to make it as easy and quick as possible for these users to get online. We’ve got large stocks of hardware sitting in the appropriate countries to minimise delays in getting the equipment to where it’s needed most. We’re confident that we’ve got enough equipment to offer the deal to ALL serving NATO and ISAF personnel, and we can deliver service on a variety of satellites, wherever our forces are working.
“Most people don’t realise that the ordinary troops and serving personnel rarely have access to the internet in many of these places because it simply doesn’t exist there. We’ve made a name for ourselves supplying communications for the military, but inet is aimed really at the ordinary soldiers and airmen.
The Tariam inet kit includes everything the user with a PC needs to get online quickly enabling them to exchange emails, make and receive voice calls, browse the internet and even use a webcam to see their loved ones. There’s a list of bases and camps that can use the service on Tariam’s website, but all of Afghanistan and Iraq are well covered.
Selwyn said also, “The core of the solution is hardware that’s been extensively tested and is well proven in a variety of environments, but the key thing is that troops often transit through camps or bases and are only around for fairly short periods before moving on. The way the product works allows groups of individuals to club together to get a location online with no capital outlay and the users can then just pay as they come and go.
More information on Tariam inet is available now by browsing the Tariam website and clicking Afghanistan & Iraq.
Fiscal 2011 Budget: Military Space Programs
Chairman Nelson, Senator Vitter, and distinguished members of the Committee, it is an honor to appear before this Committee as the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs, and to discuss our military space activities. I support the Secretary of the Air Force with his responsibilities as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space Programs. I believe the overall soundness of our Air Force space program is best illustrated by our consecutive string of 64 successful national security space launches over the past 10 years, most recently demonstrated with the December 2009 launch of the third Wideband Global Satellite Communications (SATCOM) satellite aboard a Delta IV launch vehicle.
This record is the result of a world-class team of space professionals across our government and industry, all dedicated to the single purpose of providing essential capabilities to our joint warfighters and allies around the world. With superior space systems we provide our leadership with intelligence and situational awareness that otherwise would be impossible to collect. Space enables us to employ military force in both irregular warfare and conventional situations – we see the battlefield more clearly and destroy targets with greater precision. While acknowledging the ever increasing advantages that these space capabilities provide, we acknowledge that many of the satellites and associated infrastructure have outlived their intended design lives.
To ensure the availability of these systems, the military space portion of the President’s FY2011 budget submission is focused on the continuity of key mission areas including worldwide communication; global positioning, navigation and timing; global missile warning; weather; and launch. Simultaneously, we are enhancing the protection of our space capabilities through improved Space Situational Awareness (SSA), defensive counterspace, and reconstitution efforts. This calendar year we will bear the fruit of investments from previous years with the planned launches of four “first of” operational satellites. The four “first of” satellites are the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) protected communications satellite, Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) satellite, Global Positioning System (GPS) II-F satellite, and Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) 1 satellite.
Worldwide communication is enabled through a ubiquitous space- based system with government and commercial platforms. Our users stretch from the Oval Office to the mountains of Afghanistan. Using protected, wideband, or narrowband communications, the President can command the nation’s nuclear forces, our UAV pilots can fly Predators over Iraq and Afghanistan from the United States, and Special Forces teams can call for exfiltration or tactical air support.
Global positioning, navigation and timing is a free worldwide service. It provides position accuracy down to the centimeter and time accuracy to the nanosecond over the entire planet, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, and in any weather. The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community depend on our Global Positioning System (GPS) to support a myriad of missions and capabilities including weapon system guidance, precise navigation, satellite positioning, and communication network timing. The civil and commercial communities are equally reliant on GPS as the underpinning for a vast infrastructure of services and products including search and rescue, banking, map surveying, farming, and even sports and leisure activities.
LAUNCH
National Space policy requires assured access to space. Currently this requirement is satisfied by the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program consisting of the Delta IV and Atlas V launch vehicles. The first 30 EELV launches have all been successful, and are part of our consecutive string of 64 successful national security space launches. Efficiencies are achieved through combined engineering, production, and launch operations while maintaining the separate Delta IV and Atlas V families of launch vehicles for assured access. The FY2011 budget request funds EELV launch capability (ELC), or infrastructure activities and on-going support for over eight launch services planned for 2011. In addition, we request funding for three EELV launch vehicles which will launch in 2013. We combined the two launch vehicle families into the United Launch Alliance (ULA), resulting in some cost savings due to labor reductions and facility consolidations; however, launch costs are still rising. Factors contributing to rising launch costs are the depletion of inventory purchased in prior years, reduced number of annual buys increasing unit costs, and a deteriorating subcontractor business base without commercial customers. These industrial base factors will also be affected by the decision to replace NASA’s Constellation program with a new, more technology-focused approach to space exploration, which will likely reduce the customer base for solid rocket motors and potentially increase demand for liquid engines and strengthen the liquid-fuel rocket industrial base. We have initiated several efforts to examine the severity of these business base issues and identify potential mitigation steps.
SPACE PROTECTION
The need for increased space protection of our space assets is paramount, and requires enhanced Space Situational Awareness (SSA) capabilities and a legitimate battle management system. We need improved accuracy, responsiveness, timeliness, and data integration to support the warfighter. Our FY2011 budget request continues development of the Joint Space Operation Center (JSpOC) Mission System (JMS) to provide this capability and replace our aging mission systems. The JMS program will provide a single, theater-integrated, command and control, information technology system to allow informed and rapid decisions with real-time, actionable SSA. An operational utility evaluation effort will deliver the foundational infrastructure and mission applications to deploy a services-oriented architecture (SOA) with user defined applications
The JSpOC is our single focal point for monitoring space activity. Over the last year, the JSpOC has transitioned the Air Force’s commercial and foreign entities (CFE) pilot effort into USSTRATCOM’s SSA sharing program. This involved growing the capability to monitor and conduct conjunction assessments for all U.S. government, commercial, and foreign active satellites, over 1,000 systems. As a result, the SSA sharing program screens for collisions daily, and has a formalized information sharing process that reports potential conjunctions to commercial and foreign satellite owners and operators.
The Space Fence and Space-Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) are two programs critical to providing increased SSA data. The Space Fence is a three station, worldwide, radar system to detect and track smaller sized space objects, while the SBSS satellite is an optical system to search, detect, and track objects in earth orbit, particularly those in geosynchronous orbit. The Space Fence replaces the Air Force Space Surveillance System (AFSSS), and SBSS builds upon our success with the Space Based Visible (SBV) technology demonstration. In the FY2011 budget, the industry teams working on the Space Fence program will complete a Preliminary Design Review, and the SBSS program will conduct on- orbit operations of the SBSS Block 10 satellite, planned to launch this summer. Additionally, we will continue efforts toward a SBSS follow-on by completing the acquisition strategy and conducting a full and open competition.
Warsaw Business Journal interviewed Marcin Frąckiewicz, CEO of TS2
Warsaw Business Journal interviewed Marcin Frąckiewicz, CEO of TS2 Satellite Technologies, a global satellite access services provider
WBJ: US Marine Corps, US Army Corps of Engineers, GROM and many more… How did you manage to gain these impressive contracts?
Marcin Frąckiewicz: To answer I need to go back to the beginning. During my trips to Iraq I noticed that ordinary American soldiers, different from Polish, had literally no access to the internet or cell-phones to get in touch with their loved ones. This is when we started to offer them a wireless internet access via satellite. Groups of soldiers pooled money to buy our terminals. They referred us to their colleagues from next contingents and so on. Popularity among regular soldiers brought inquiries from official US institutions, and this is how we were allowed to those big tenders with government orders and with contractors for the US Army. US Army Corps of Engineers bought around 100 BGAN terminals – these are smaller than laptops, but are more expensive than over-sized VSAT access equipment. However, individual soldiers still remain our most important customers.
WBJ: How many customers does your company have? Are these just military?
MF: It is a list of about 50-60 institutional customers, not only military, but also private companies that use our VSAT internet access. With our partner we provide services for nine US embassies in Africa. The number of individual soldiers using our services in Iraq and Afghanistan is around 15,000. Non-military customers include Agora, for example, which equips its foreign correspondents with satellite phones. World Bank also uses our phone services. This customer list comprises several hundred.
WBJ: How you make your services competitive?
MF: Price is the key. We cooperate with cheap middleman and also directly with satellite operators. We buy services in Dubai, where our partners’ warehouses and distributors of the equipment are located. It is also a tax-free zone, so here go another costs. We have partner install teams on site in the Middle East, so we are able to set up the VSAT access very quickly.
Our company tries to minimize the operation costs, hence our small office and a large network of partners. This is a business, where you win by knowledge rather than by building a big structure.
MP: Will you suffer from recently announced spending cuts at the Defense Ministry?
MF: I doubt it. 85 percent of our orders go abroad. Of course there will be fewer government tenders and the competition will grow. So we have to expect fewer orders for our satellite phones in Poland. Plus some contracts for internet access may not be renewed.
WBJ: What will you do when the American troops withdraw from Iraq then?
MF: From the business point of view obviously we are not looking forward to US pulling out, as most of our activity is based on the US Army presence in the Middle East. We would need to come up with a solution to reorganize our business. But there would still be corporate customers left for us.
WBJ: How do you see the future of this sector?
MF: We are anxiously awaiting launching of the Ka-Sat scheduled for 2010. The aim of this project is to make satellite access services cheap enough for ordinary Kowalski to make use of it. The prices of bands are to drop ten times, while the equipment is also expected to cost a few hundred złoty rather than several thousands. Our company would also like to get involved in this new offer, because it will help us target individual customers.
About TS2 Satellite Provider
TS2 specializes in providing global satellite access services. Our core business is broadband access to the Internet in areas with poor telecommunications infrastructure and mobile satellite phones communication. The main medium of used transmission is a two-way satellite transfer system, which provides good access to the satellite network in even the least accessible areas. It not only provides a broadband connection but also a wide range of additional data and voice services.
Before end of 2008 year, the TS2 solutions have been implemented for United States Marine Corps (USMC), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Australian Defence Force (ADF), Command of Polish Navy, Polish National Police, Polish National Headquarters of the State Fire Services, Border Guard (Poland), World Bank Group, Lockheed Martin Information Technology, Halliburton Energy Services, KBR, General Dynamics Information Technology, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., L-3 Communications Vertex Aerospace, US Naval Research Laboratory, ITT Corporation – Aerospace / Communications Division, CACI Technologies, ARINC Incorporated, North Eastern Aeronautical Company (Neany), Warsaw Stock Exchange, Polish Supreme Chamber of Control, Polish State Railways PKP S.A., University of Warsaw, Reuters, TVP – Polish TV, PAP – Polish Press Agency, BMW – Bayerische Motoren Werke, DaimlerChrysler, IBM – International Business Machines Corporation, HP – Hewlett-Packard, Carrefour, Colgate-Palmolive, PGNiG – Polish Petroleum and Gas Mining, White&Case, Sun Microsystems, PMM – Polish Medical Mission, UPS – United Parcel Service and Polish Medical Air Rescue.