Our Technology

Space Segment

Ground Segment

User Equipment

How It Works

How It Works

Our data communications services are provided by our proprietary two-way satellite system, which is designed to provide "near-real-time" and "store-and-forward" communication to and from both fixed and mobile assets around the world.

Our system has three operational segments:

1. The space segment, which consists of a constellation of 30 operational satellites in multiple orbital planes between 435 and 550 miles above the Earth.
   
   
2. The ground and control segment , which consists of thirteen operational gateway earth stations that send signals to and receive signals from the satellites, five gateway control centers that process message traffic and forward it through the gateway earth stations to the satellites or to appropriate terrestrial communications networks for transmission to the back-office application or end-user and the network control center (including two of the five gateway control centers) located in Dulles, Virginia, which monitors and manages the flow of information through the system and provides the command, control and telemetry functions to optimize satellite availability.
   
   
3. The subscriber segment , which consists of the subscriber communicators used by end-users to transmit and receive messages to and from their assets and our satellites.

For most applications using our system, data is generated by an end-user application and transferred to a subscriber communicator, which reformats the data and transmits it to the next satellite that comes into view. The data is routed by the satellite to the next gateway earth station it successfully connects to, which in turn forwards it to the associated gateway control center. Within the gateway control center, the data is processed and forwarded to its ultimate destination after acknowledgement to the subscriber communicator that the entire data message content has been received. The destination may be another subscriber communicator, a corporate resource management system, any personal or business Internet e-mail address, a pager or a cellular phone. In addition, data can be sent in the reverse direction (a feature which is utilized by many applications to remotely control assets).

When a satellite is in view of and connected to a gateway earth station at the time it receives data from a subscriber communicator, a transmission is initiated to transfer the data in what we refer to as "near-real-time" mode. In this "near-real-time" mode, the data is passed immediately from a subscriber communicator to a satellite and onto the gateway earth station to the appropriate control center for routing to its final destination. When a satellite is not immediately in view of a gateway earth station, the satellite switches to a store-and-forward mode to accept data in  "GlobalGram" format. These GlobalGrams are short messages (consisting of data of up to approximately 200 bytes) and are stored in a satellite until it can connect through a gateway earth station to the appropriate control center. The automatic mode-switching capability between near-real-time service and GlobalGram service allows the satellite network to be available to subscriber communicators worldwide regardless of their location.

End-user data can be delivered by the gateway control center in a variety of formats. Communications options include private and public communications links to the control center, such as standard Internet, dedicated telephone company and VPN-based transports. Data can also be received via standard e-mail protocols with full delivery acknowledgement as requested, or via our Internet protocol gateway interface in HTML and XML formats. Wherever possible, our system makes use of existing, mature technologies and conforms to internationally accepted standards for electronic mail and web technologies.