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Inside view
AIMING FOR THE SKIES Recession-proof is how the satellite industry in the Middle East calls itself. While most other verticals have been feeling the pinch of the slowdown, to a lesser or greater extent, satellite services appear to have beaten the trend entirely. "The recession has not had a great impact on our business. This is because satellite services are really something that support essential communication. This is where people do not really have a choice, and since we provide cost-effective solutions compared to our competitors, we can have the end-users actually saving money by deploying our solutions," says Sven Rohte, chief commercial officer at Thuraya. Inmarsat's VP of strategic corporate development, Samer Halawi agrees: "If you look at the people who use our services, they use them because they have to, not because it is a luxury. So the impact has been very minimal. A slowdown could be felt as a result of building faster networks, but that will be felt down the years and not immediately." The essential nature of the services provided by satellites often take the shape of telecom-based voice communications provided to corporates and organisations with remote offices across the JUNE
region. In fact, this is counted as one of the biggest and most obvious advantage of a satellite service. "When you have a highly urban area, usually it is very well connected by terrestrial services. But as soon as you get out of urban areas and go to places with low population density you start losing services. As an organisation, you have to cover those areas but to cover them with terrestrial services is really not cost effective. With satellite services you get blanket coverage so you can focus more effectively on those people in the remote and rural areas," explains Halawi. He also points out that satellite communications are much more effective when companies have a highly mobile workforce. "While terrestrial services have a huge cost advantage, satellite services cannot be equalled in certain applications - such as point to multi-point transmission as is necessary in the broadcasting industry. Apart from a larger area of coverage, satellites also score higher in terms of reliability in certain countries where telecom operations are not highly advanced," says Shawkat Ahmed, chief commercial officer at Al Yah Satellite Communications Company (Yahsat).
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The Highly Circulated Satellite Magazine
2012