News on Arsat-1: Argentina is first country in the region to build and run a geostationary telecom satellite Argentina yesterday became the first Latin American country to build and operate a geostationary satellite, joining a select club of countries with that achievement and marking a seachange in the telecommunications sector for the country and its neighbours. The Arsat-1 launch yesterday brought Argentina into a club that includes the US, China, Russia, Japan, Israel, India and the European Union. The first in a series of three satellites for the so-called Argentine Geostationary Satellite Telecommunications System, Arsat-1 was developed by state-owned firm Arsat and designed and manufactured by Río Negro province’s INVAP. It will provide television services, Internet access and data and telephone services, for a price tag of US$270 million that includes manufacturing costs from 2006, shipping to French Guiana, launch costs and international insurance. Rural areas that previously had limited telecommunication coverage will benefit from the satellite’s orbit. Some 400 specialists worked on the satellite over an eight-year period, logging a cumulative 1.3 million man-hours in the design, construction and testing the highly-sophisticated equipment, which has been desgined to have a working life of 15 years. As it is a geostationary satellite, Arsat-1 will be “parked” in orbit over Argentina, granting it coverage of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The Malvinas Islands and Argentine bases in the Antarctic will also be included. Geostationary satellites are the most complex to put into operation as they are required to orbit at the same speed as the earth while also maintaining a significant distance in order to transmit information over a wide area. The satellite will be part of a telecommunications network that had been previously outsourced to German and French companies, opening up commercial possibilities that will go a long way to defraying the cost of the launch and production of the satellite itself. Estimates say that the investment will be regained after seven years in operation, while at the time reducing expensive leasing outlays. As such, Arsat-1 is only the first of a series of three launches that will build an alternative telecommunications network that will extend all the way to North America. Arsat-2, for which construction has already been completed and is now going testing, will be launched in 2015 and in 2017 Arsat-3 will also be launched. Telecommunication services will thus extend throughout the Spanish-speaking regions of the Americas, reaching millions of new potential subscribers and users. “Arsat-1 is equipped with antennae compatible with Open Digital Television, Internet and telephone-over-IP and in that orbit we have a leased satellite from which clients will be migrating” towards the new satellite, said Martín Bianchi, president of Arsat. He added that “80 percent of the traffic consumed on the Internet is produced abroad — once the infrastructure is put into place Argentina will be able to increase the amount of the content included on Spanish-speaking television networks.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 22:01:49 +0000
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