Telesat has disclosed a significant expansion in their relationship with OmniAccess contracting for HTS capacity on the company’s Telstar 12 VANTAGE satellite to serve the Caribbean region.
Telesat was the first satellite operator to provide bandwidth to OmniAccess and the companies have been working closely together for nearly a decade. OmniAccess has been providing mobile broadband to cruise ships and yachts in the Mediterranean using Telesat’s Telstar 11N and Telstar 12 VANTAGE satellites and also to the Atlantic using Telstar 14R in combination with Telesat’s teleport in Mount Jackson, Virginia.
All antennas are deployed. Photo of Telesat’s Telstar 12 VANTAGE satellite. Photo is courtesy of Telesat and Airbus Defence and Space.
For this latest agreement, OmniAccess chose the HTS Caribbean beam of Telesat’s Telstar 12 VANTAGE to bring a new standard of broadband performance to superyachts and other passenger vessels operating throughout the Caribbean – performance that supports links with aggregate throughput in excess of 220 Mbps.
Telesat VANTAGE satellites represent a new generation of spacecraft optimized to serve the types of bandwidth intensive applications increasingly in demand across the satellite industry. Telstar 12 VANTAGE was launched November 2015 to 15 degrees West and provides powerful new coverage for mobility services over the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Caribbean and the South Atlantic. Two other Telstar VANTAGE satellites are under construction and scheduled for launch mid-2018: Telstar 18 VANTAGE over Asia and Telstar 19 VANTAGE serving the Americas.
Bertrand Hartman, OmniAccess’ CEO, reported that Telstar 12 VANTAGE enables OmniAccess to deliver their superyacht and cruise ship customers a broadband experience on par with advanced terrestrial services for a new level in maritime broadband across the region, with 200 Mbps into vessels and over 20 Mbps on the return.
According to Tom Eaton, the Vice President, International Sales, for Telesat, Telstar 12 VANTAGE is a powerful HTS designed to provide customers such as OmniAccess with important operational and commercial advantages.