Satellite keeps Timor border team in touch

ADAM GIFFORD discovers how Kiwis rebuilding East Timor overcame their isolation.

New Zealand agencies helping to rebuild infrastructure in East Timor are relying on satellite phones to maintain communications.

The Customs Department's Auckland air and marine manager, Paul Campbell, who is leading a team helping the East Timorese to establish border controls, said the job would have been far harder without the Inmarsat mini-M satellite phone supplied by Rocom New Zealand.

When the team went in this year, "we had no information to suggest that there were any hard-line telephone services available," he said.

"The advice we were getting was that reliable voice and data transmission would be achieved only by way of satellite," Mr Campbell said.

"While the team now has cellular phones, the satellite phone will remain because it gives them a communication avenue that is not requiring any on-the-ground support."

As well as providing voice communication, the phone acts as a data link allowing the contingent to receive documents.

Five customs officers were initially sent for three months, but their stay was extended at the request of the UN.

Customs here has been using a satellite phone on its patrol boat for a year to provide robust communications beyond the range of secure radio and normal cellphone services.

Rocom business director Andrew Wilson said satellite services were the only reliable way groups in remote parts of Asia could communicate.

"They're used by Government and aid organisations and by media when they're covering areas of trouble where they can't rely on local infrastructure or there isn't any," he said.

The phones had also found a niche in utility industries, where they could back up network communications.

He said even at a data transfer rate of 2.4 kilobytes a second the Inmarsat mini-M - in combination with a PDA (personal digital assistant), laptop or desktop computer - offered an effective fax and data service.

The phone costs about $7000, with calls costing from $3.50 a minute.

Inmarsat is a network of four geostationary satellites orbiting 36,000 km above the Earth.

The service has lower running costs than the failed Iridium service, which required a network of 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites.

Mr Wilson said the biggest application of the phone was yet to come.

The new 64kbps World Communicator, using Inmarsat's Global Area Network, would allow television to cover breaking news with digital video.

By using "store and forward" technology, crews would be able to provide coverage delayed about an hour.

Herald Online feature: the Timor mission

UN Transitional Administration in E Timor