Inmarsat has picked Telecom New Zealand to establish and manage a satellite access station in Pacific Ocean Region for its Global Xpress worldwide satellite broadband network.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Under the deal, Telecom will develop its Warkworth Satellite Earth Station, located near Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island, to host Inmarsat and its GX satellite antenna. Warkworth will act as a co-primary GX satellite access stations for the region, alongside Inmarsat’s own land earth station and teleport based in Auckland.
Both will act as gateways between the broadband traffic routed via the POR satellite and terrestrial fixed networks, Telecom NZ said in a statement.
The station is one of the six satellite access stations in the region for the GX network, which Inmarsat says is the world’s first global Ka-band network that provides mobile users with broadband speeds of up to 50Mbps.
Leo Mondale, Inmarsat’s managing director of growth management & support, said: “The sites for all six GX satellite access stations have now been selected and operational readiness is well advanced on the stations supporting our first Inmarsat-5 satellite serving the Indian Ocean Region, which we expect to launch around the turn of the year.”
The full Inmarsat-5 constellation is on course to deployed by the end of 2014. It will provide a single global broadband service which can be accessed by users on land, at sea and in the air. The satellites are currently under construction or testing at Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems’, Mondale added.