[SatNews] atrexx Ltd. & Co. KG has teamed with Microsoft and iDirect to provide a remote communications solution for VAOS Ltd., a major provider of comprehensive construction and maintenance services to the oil, gas and petrochemical industries, employing a workforce of some 1,200 specialists. VAOS' main branch offices are located in Malta, Austria and Libya, with a number of smaller offices based in the middle of the Sahara desert — often hundreds of miles apart.

To ensure highly secure, reliable and error-free communications, VAOS selected atrexx to become a communications partner due to their ability to connect the company's remote branch offices to the corporate network. The offices use a Virtual Private Network with Microsoft's Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010, which guarantees a secure and reliable connection to all other branches via a satellite service provided by atrexx, and iDirect's iSCPC solution. Based on iSCPC, atrexx has developed a unique Quality of Service (QoS) that guarantees lower latency when using VoIP, despite many different types of traffic passing through the system that often operates on a small amount of bandwidth per link to the remote station in the desert.