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Loral Orion India to offer gateway to ISPs

Loral Orion India is a 51:49 joint venture between Natelco and the US-based Loral Orion. The latter is part of the $1.7-billion Loral Space Systems.

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The Indian company has a planned investment of $5 million and the paid-up equity is $1.5 million.

ISPs and companies located in the software technology parks would be the target market for the Loral Orion India's 'WorldCast' service.

The company would market transponder space of the Orion 3 satellite, scheduled for launch in January.

Of the 25 Ku-band transponders on the satellite, eight have been earmarked for the Indian region. Another 10 C-band transponders offer coverage for the entire Asian region, including China, India and Australia.

The company is hoping to capitalise on its single-hop connection to the US to offer minimum response time.

Beams from Orion 3 will be downlinked at Loral Orion's teleport in Hawaii, which is connected to the US west cost through eight 45 MBPS streams.

Loral Orion would offer direct connectivity to tier-I US ISPs on the west coast, Hariharan said.

ISPs would be offered asymmetric bandwidths for uplink and downlink since the incoming download traffic is bound to be higher.

Discussions with prospective ISPs have indicated that the common configuration would be 128 KBPS speed on the downlink stream and 2 MBPS for the uplink feed.

The system would also be capable of offering unified uplink feeds, and split downlink feeds to multiple locations, Hariharan said.

With regard to the software market, Loral Orion India plans to target the Bangalore STP where latent demand has been identified.

The company would provide simple transponder leasing since most STPs set up their own terrestrial infrastructure.

For ISPs, however, the company plans to offer end-to-end networking, complete with hook-ups to ISPs in the US. Prices are expected to be competitive with those of VSNL.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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