World Telecommunication Day 1999 |
While big multinational satellite-phone players like Iridium and ICO try to recoup their losses amid Chapter 11 readministration filings in the United States, a regional player, the Thuraya Satellite Communications Corp., is promising mobile phone connections for an area covering 40 percent of the world's population. Its access to substantial capital from Middle Eastern equity shareholders is helping it to weather the financial storms encountered by its international rivals, as is its initiative in signing up national service providers, which are seeking to provide mobile phone services at low development costs.
Based in the United Arab Emirates, Thuraya plans to launch its first communications satellite in May next year, followed by a full commercial launch the following September. Its services will consist of voice, short messaging, data and fax as well as global positioning system (GPS). More than 99 countries spanning Europe, North and Central Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent will fall within the range of its coverage.
Thuraya has the equity backing of many of the state-owned telecommunications companies in the Middle East, as well as other providers in Africa and Europe. Its shareholders include the United Arab Emirates' Emirates Telecommunications Corp. (Etisalat), Oman's General Telecommunications Organization, Yemen's Public Telecommunications Corp., Qatar Telecom (Q-Tel), the Bahrain Telecommunications Co. (Batelco), Egypt Telecom, Morocco's Itissalat Al Maghrib, Tunisie Telecom, the Sudan Telecommunications Co. (Sudatel), the pan-Arab Arab Satellite Communications Organization (Arabsat) and the private Kuwaiti concern, Mobile Telecommunications Co.
Hughes Space & Communications International of the United States is also on board, as is Germany's Deutsche Telepost Consulting. Earlier this year, Thuraya raised $600 million in an internationally syndicated loan to help finance the remaining project costs.
Thuraya's marketing strategy is based on partnerships with regional service providers, which will integrate the corporation's network capabilities and expertise with its existing infrastructure. In this sense, Thuraya plans to complement, rather than compete with, national operators.
Thuraya's state-owned partners are looking to lower their own development costs while expanding coverage to parts of their countries that lack basic communications.
International players in the satellite mobile phone sector, however, such as Inmarsat and Globalstar, which offer specialist services, can also be expected to target business, government and media users in Thuraya's coverage area.
Inmarsat, for example, has launched a portable satellite unit the size of a notebook computer, which will offer ISDN connections at a speed of 64 kilobits per second. It will allow corporate IT networks to integrate with global satellite mobile communications to service their customers, suppliers and manufacturers using a wide range of desktop software.
As Andrew Ivey, Inmarsat's marketing manager for projects, notes, while 40 percent of traffic today on its network consists of data, the company expects this figure to rise to 70 percent by 2003. BBC News Resources of Britain, for example, uses Inmarsat's satellite services ''to help us cover breaking news in remote regions, both for television and radio,'' says Jonathan Higgins, manager of location facilities. The portable units, he adds, ''give us a real edge.'
Pamela Ann Smith