Broadband Global Area Network

I attended the Wellington launch of NZ coverage for Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) services. Inmarsat (who own and launched the BGAN network) and Wrights (who provide satellite technology in NZ) provided some presentations followed by a hands on demonstration of the Thrane Explorer units that provide the voice and data access to the inmarsat satellites.

BGAN coverage has been extended to New Zealand following the launch last year of an additional Inmarsat 4 satellite that meant that the orbits of all three satellites could be reconfigured to provide global coverage. BGAN is mature well proven technology that has been available for a number of years in the rest of the world so it's great to finally have a range of options for satellite broadband in NZ.


A whole host of agencies and companies attended the launch including 'business as usual' customers who have remote monitoring data requirements as well as a range of emergency services and civil defence organisations from as far away as Canterbury, as well as some private companies and media.

The base station kit seemed to do what it said on the tin, all of the units are easily portable and have slightly varying data rates but essentially all support VOIP and data.

As this photo shows WebEOC loaded fine on the smallest base station - it would be good to do some more in depth testing especially with the Emergeo GIS Smart Client.

As well as the usual VOIP, data and streaming video capability it seems someone else had already had my bright idea and as an add-on unit you can establish a picocell within an Emergency Operations Centre in order to allow staff to continue to use their mobile phones even if the land-based mobile phone network is inoperable.

A number of agencies have already bought BGAN base stations in anticipation of coverage becoming available so it will be great to see the first domestic agencies deploying a similar capability to that which I saw Hutt Valley Emergency Management have with IPSTAR a couple of months ago.

I think as the importance of resilient data communications is recognised we will see agencies employing a range of options from ISDN, fibre, microwave, digital radio data, BGAN and IPSTAR depending on bandwidth and deployability requirements.



As an 'EOC in a bag' it would be hard to beat a BGAN, ruggedised laptop, mini printer and mini-data projector, unless you had something like this 4*4 complete with a satellite tracking dish on the roof and a wireless network to establish your VOIP, live video streaming and data links. Whilst this may seem far fetched setups like this are an established capability for many agencies overseas and need appropriate consideration.