NETWORKS
There are a number of cases of ďŹ bre cables being cut by ships’ anchors or natural disasters. Satellite has proven itself resilient. SIMON PRYOR MENOS marketing manager, Newtec.
solutions due it their challenging budgets. Increasingly they are looking for more cost effective solutions and how they can share resources with other people to make the business proposition more interesting,� says Pryor. The MENOS project is a collaboration between the Arab States Broadcasting Union, Arabsat and Newtec. Originally only available to ASBU member broadcasters, the service has since been opened up to commercial channels and other non-members as it looks to expand throughout the region beyond. “We are seeing interest from countries such as Saudi Arabia, which is looking to expand its TV and radio offerings. There is a lot of from those countries with less developed infrastructure, they are looking to MENOS as it can provide immediate coverage of their entire country without the need to lay cables or the roll out other terrestrial networks. As well as MENA there has also been interest from East Africa, West Africa and southern Africa, despite all the new submarine cables that are being deployed around Africa and the Middle East.� Pryor says that as satellite operators launch new hardware to serve the Middle East, Newtec will
look to exploit the additional capacity to expand the number of customersm MENOS services as well as the geographic footprint of the network. “Our immediate limit is satellite capacity. There is some room for expansion at the moment but ultimately it is something that is limiting MENOS at the moment. This should be resolved by the middle of this year when we get more bandwidth. Some of the customers that we have talked to, will only come online when that capacity is made available,� reveals Pryor. The argument in favour of dedicated fibre line file transfer is that these services permit point-to-point delivery. Satellite transmission requires broadcasters to pay to send the information over a wider footprint, even if there is only one intended recipient. “It’s true that in point-to-point certain types of infrastructure work well but satellite has the advantage when you are sending the same contribution to multiple broadcasters at the same time. One of the other issues is resilience. There are a number of cases of fibre cables being cut by ships’ anchors or natural disasters. Satellite has proven itself resilient,� says Pryor.
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044 MARCH 2010
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