HISPASAT offers highly specialised and personalised engineering services to its clients, providing users with high added value when defining and designing cutting-edge customised solutions that will allow them to develop and carry out their business plans successfully, according to their specific requirements.
In 2019 the Customer Engineering team designed over 1,000 networks, drew up more than 1000 transmission plans, and approved over 100 new professional ground stations and more than 1300 VSAT user-type terminals, all operating with HISPASAT satellites.
NEW SERVICES AND ADVANCED SOLUTIONS
MOBILITY SERVICES
One of the company’s main markets for expansion throughout 2019 has continued to be the mobility market, boosting the development of new solutions in the ground sector and generating advanced solutions for clients in the railway, air and maritime markets as well as new pilots for buses and cars, among others.
The agreement with the company Phasor to develop a specially designed antenna that adapts to the requirements of ground mobility applications is noteworthy. Thanks to this flat antenna, barely 5 cm tall, professional vehicles can remain connected via satellite wherever they need to travel along their journeys.
The engineering team has been working on this project throughout 2019, with significant milestones including the PDR and concept trials.
Trains
During 2019 numerous activities to optimise the “PlayRenfe” service on current AVE trains have been carried out, incorporating advanced monitoring and geo-localisation functionalities, as well as studying various architectures and technical solutions to expand this rail solution to other countries and other train fleets.
Ships
HISPASAT has continued to develop its offering for managed maritime connectivity. In 2019 the coverage of its platforms was extended to the entire American footprint of its satellites located at the 30ºW position, allowing terminals with different types of antennae (from <1 m to >2.4 m) to operate, linked to a wide variety of vessels (cruises, leisure boats, fishing boats, merchants, and others). Accordingly, in 2019 Customer Engineering created numerous optimised network designs to enable maximum performance and efficiency levels, while at the same time optimising the service areas required for new maritime services.
Aircraft
In this field, due to demand for the service, the Client Engineering team has had to closely monitor it and carry out activities to optimise capacity.
CELLULAR BACKHAUL
Defined as a means of connection between mobile phone stations and mobile operator switching centres, cellular backhaul via satellite is a growing service both in developed and developing countries. Satellites are proving in a lot of cases to be the only connectivity solution for these remote stations.
Throughout 2019 HISPASAT has boosted its presence in these types of services in Latin American countries like Mexico, Peru and Brazil, where the capacity that is dedicated to these uses has been increased, as it has been in other more developed countries with greater terrestrial deployment, such as the United States, where the increasing demand and the rapid growth of 4G traffic networks have come up against the difficulty of extending coverage to remote areas. Improved efficiency and cost savings in solutions via satellite, as well as the advantages of its global coverage, high capacity and scalability have all been key factors in this development.
The involvement of the Client Engineering team, by defining and sizing the services, carrying out detailed analyses of existing technologies to make the most of their benefits, and by seeking technology improvements and more appropriate fleet capacity, has been a particularly noteworthy feature in all of these projects. Among all the mobile backhaul via satellite projects implemented during 2019, we would like to highlight the project to migrate and grow Vivo’s backhaul networks in Brazil, which involved occupying several hundred MHz to allow for the growth of 2G and 3G mobile traffic in remote areas of Brazil. This was an extremely complex, large-scale project headed up by Client Engineering, in which a multidisciplinary team had to be coordinated (engineering, installation, operations, equipment suppliers, etc.).
DIGITAL DIVIDE AND WIFI HOTSPOTS
During 2019 HISPASAT has undertaken projects aimed at reducing the digital divide in rural areas of various countries. The Client Engineering team worked on several projects to roll out satellite connected WiFi hotspots in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil, providing connectivity to remote rural locations that do not have terrestrial broadband access services.
These projects allow the inhabitants of these locations to access high-speed Internet with their WiFi device (smartphone, tablet or laptop) by buying pre-paid vouchers from local businesses.
The Client Engineering team actively participated in analysing WiFi technologies and commercial solutions to choose the most appropriate ones depending on the requirements of the various projects. Among the activities carried out, defining the service architecture, analysing the capabilities of the different network and service management platforms, analysing the integration of solutions with local partners’ business support systems, and supervising technical laboratory and field tests prior to commissioning the service stand out.
NEW VIDEO PARTNERS AND NEW BUSINESS MODELS
ADVANCED VIDEO SERVICE SOLUTIONS: PUSH VOD
In the area of new technological solutions for the audiovisual mobility market, the Client Engineering team has worked on defining a new video on demand (VoD) platform via satellite for maritime environments. This technological solution allows telecommunications providers to offer their clients an appealing selection of multimedia content on their mobile device (tablet, smartphone or laptop). Receiving this signal requires the installation on the boat of a small satellite receiving antenna and user equipment, where content is stored and later transmitted via WiFi to all users. For this project, HISPASAT has collaborated with companies such as Quadrille, Vodomedia and Noovo.
HISPASAT demonstrated this service at the IBC 2019 fair.
SECURITY AND EMERGENCY SERVICES
In 2019 HISPASAT worked on network designs optimised for the use of a ManPack type terminal developed by OVZON for “on the Pause” communications. Also, various networks were configured to act as demonstrators with the aforementioned terminal on HISPASAT’s space capacity, across both American and European coverage. The demonstration carried out for the National Police in Valencia during the EUCNC 2019 event stands out. This involved the OVZON terminal being used to send different types of signals, both real-time video and data, attending to the needs of the special operations arm of the National Police.
NEW FLEET SATELLITES AND OPTIMISATION OF CURRENT CAPACITY
During 2019, Client Engineering spent a great deal of time drawing up plans to optimise capacity for all HISPASAT fleet satellites, which have enabled the company to increase and adapt the available offer to customer demands, both in terms of space capacity and as regards broadband services.
Linked to these plans, several service migrations, both in-house and for HISPASAT customers, were planned and executed to optimise capacities and improve the technical conditions of the said services (more advanced technologies, coverage improvement, etc.).
In addition, the team helped to define the coverage areas, the necessary supplies, the location of the gateways and the definition of the frequencies that could be considered for the new fleet satellite Amazonas Nexus.
© Informe Anual Hispasat 2018
Paseo de la Castellana, 39 28046 Madrid Spain
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