Actually the Hercules metaphor works best with the Mobile Satellite Trailer. It’s a beast.

Big question:  How do we ship it overseas?

Answer:  In a container.  You can easily get four crated trailers in a single 40 foot container.  And partially disassembled, you may be able to fit more.  So if you’re a customer or dealer in Africa, Australia or Asia, fear not.  They’ll ship quickly and easily.

In from the Outback.  Two people approached us with the story we hear a lot.

“We have had trailers built, but at Australian mines they just don’t hold up.”

Our trailers were literally built with direct input from oil, gas and mining customers.  We have fixed the weaknesses, and now have a robust trailer that’ll handle every environment you work in.

This guy comes to the booth, and immediately engages me in conversation. He’s based in Florida, but talks of customers in North Africa who could not only use our Mobile Satellite Internet Trailer for disaster response; oil, gas, and mining; etc., but that the Nomad would be very popular there, too.

It makes sense.  Around the world, while auto-pointing equipment is much appreciated, the technical staff are quite capable of pointing satellite dishes themselves, and find they can have many fixed dishes for the price of an auto-pointing.   A fixed dish mounted on the Nomad Rapid Deployment System, equipped with the Nomad Az/El Cap is fully rigid when well staked, but also eminently portable when folded and loaded in the back of a small truck.

I had a great conversation yesterday with a hub operator in Turkey.  He’s really interested in deploying mobile satellite trailers throughout the Middle East for emergency preparedness.  We’ll talk about integrating our technology with the various Middle East service providers.

Let me list the countries some of our new Satellite 2011 friends come from:

• Oman
• South Africa
• Singapore
• Argentina
• UK
• India

If any of these customers were to call us a year ago, we’d have referred them to another ISP.

Now with the MST, we can provide customers outside our normal footprint with hardware, and they augment it as they wish.

We’re so pleased to have had the opportunity to make new friends.

Come by booth 342 at Satellite 2011, and we’ll discuss how we can make our new relationship work.

Reporting from the floor of Satellite 2011 here.  Frequent questions we’re getting from conference attendees are can we:

• put multiple manufacturers’ antennas on our Mobile Satellite Trailer
• provide service outside the USA
• put a 1.8 meter antenna on the MST
• support high bandwidth

So many questions.

1.  We’re willing to work with you.  If your application requires a dish from another manufacturer, we’ll make sure it is compatible with our teleport, and figure out how to meet your needs.

2.  Our teleport provides service to customers through the US, Canada, Central America and the Caribbean.  We’re willing to sell equipment we manufacture ourselves, such as the MST and the Nomad Az/El cap, anywhere in the world.  Give us a call.

3.  We do provide our MST with a 1.8 meter dish.  No problem!

4. While we can’t do gigabytes of data bandwidth per second, our committed information rates will help you get there faster than other carriers who don’t guarantee bandwidth.  So for VoIP, RoIP, video surveillance, cellular backhaul and other communications applications, you’ll have the access to assured bandwidth that will help you get access when you need it.

If you haven’t heard yet, part of the Skycasters team will be out of the office this week for the 30^th Annual SATELLITE 2011 Conference in Washington, D.C.  We will be among 9,500 colleagues from all sectors of the satellite Internet community with the goal of sharing the most innovative best practices and technological advances in the satellite world. Collaboration is what SATELLITE 2011 is all about!

Along with our team will be our one-of-a-kind disaster response mobile satellite Internet trailer showcased for all to drool over, learn about, and add to their own team. If you will be attending the Conference and Exhibit, be sure you stop by our booth and say “Hello.” You can even participate in our free giveaway!

That’s right—Skycasters will be giving away an Apple TV and a Kindle to the lucky winners of our Facebook and Twitter contest, respectively. To enter the sweepstakes, all you have to do is “Like” Skycasters on Facebook and “Follow” Skycasters on Twitter.  If you are at the event and are a proud parent of a Smartphone, simply stop by our booth and snap a picture of our Facebook and Twitter QR codes to be entered into the contest (must have QR code reader phone application downloaded).

The contest is open to both event attendees as well as all Facebook and Twitter users, with the winners randomly selected and announced on the social media sites March 31^st at 4pm EST.

We will also be keeping you all up-to-date with what is being discussed throughout the SATELLITE 2011 Conference and Exhibit. Just stay tuned to the Skycasters Satellite Internet Blog (subscribe to our RSS feed if you really want to be ‘in the know’) and we will be posting Questions and Answers about our Emergency Response Satellite Internet Trailer throughout the week.

We are all very excited about this event, yet especially in the wake of such devastating natural disasters, mobile satellite Internet solutions should not be overlooked as an emergency response necessity that saves lives.  Stayed tuned and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comment area below and we will be sure to follow up with you.

Brrr….

Well, winter’s coming. No doubt about it. It hasn’t snowed yet here in Akron, but the frost was thick on the car windshield this morning. It’s only a matter of time, I suppose.

Here at Skycasters, the arrival of frigid temperatures can mean only one thing – time for preventative maintenance!
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I wish Arthur C. Clarke could have met Benjamin Franklin. I think they would have enjoyed each other immensely.

Back in the day, when Ol’ Ben was describing the permanency of the United States Constitution, he allowed that while the Constitution should stand forever, the only absolutes were end of life, and taxation.

Welcome to the new age. You throw a few satellites up into the Clarke Belt, and all of a sudden you get a new definition of permanence. Read the rest of this entry »

Phase I: The Proposal

On June 8, 2010 Skycasters submitted a proposal in Washington, D.C., for a $5.1 million in ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funds from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) committee. Project SafetyNet, as we’re calling it, will bring life-saving and economy-stimulating satellite broadband Internet to public safety organizations in unserved portions of rural America. Believe it or not, these police departments, fire departments, EMS and the like are still using dial-up, amateur radio and other last-century technology to access the Internet and communicate with one another. Not good. Here’s how our proposal will change all that.
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