BGAN receives top engineering award

The BGAN system provides satellite communication services to mobile users, whether on land, at sea, or in the air. Global coverage is achieved through the use of three Inmarsat 4 L-Band GEO satellites.

On 20 January 2010, only a few days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the BGAN system was supporting the communication needs for disaster relief forces working in a scenario where most of the terrestrial infrastructures were destroyed. A total of 472 individual user terminals accessed the BGAN spot beam over Haiti. At one moment, 137 terminals (supporting many more individual users) were sending and receiving data whilst at the same time 35 telephone conversations were underway. During the course of the day, the beam was used for a total 36,054 minutes of communication, with gigabytes of information transferred.

“The Inmarsat team is, of course, delighted that its engineering effort on BGAN, which spanned more than a decade, has been acknowledged through the prestigious MacRobert award,” says Eugene Jilg, CTO of Inmarsat.

“The team is regularly rewarded as it learns of occasions where BGAN has been used to save lives, ease suffering, or otherwise benefited the global community. but to have the special recognition The Award imparts, particularly in light of the impressive finalist competitors is deeply gratifying. ESA contributions to the BGAN programme over the years have been decisively enabling. They continue to be so.”

ESA and Inmarsat’s collaboration on BGAN started in 2003 with the establishment of the ARTES project called the BGAN Extension (BGAN-X). This project focused on the design, development, prototyping and validation of several new classes of satellite mobile terminals. This led to the development and commercial availability of a range of mobile terminal types that extended the baseline BGAN system into the land vehicular, maritime and aeronautical sectors.

In 2007, ESA and Inmarsat agreed to collaborate to extend the capabilities of the BGAN system to provide point to multipoint communications. The BGAN-extension Phase 2 project objectives are to design, develop and test new service extensions to provide efficient and reliable dissemination of data to large populations of users, and to support interactive communications such as push-to-talk voice, collaborative workgroup data applications and situational awareness applications. ESA and Inmarsat Global Ltd also announced the formal signature of the contract for the Alphasat satellite in 2007. The Alphasat programme is a major cooperation between the public and private sectors.

In 2009, ESA and Inmarsat agreed to further collaborate on the Alphasat-Extension programme. This programme will enable the Inmarsat BGAN system to provide a platform for future safety services and support a range of new products that will enhance safety of life in the maritime and aeronautical environments. It will be designed to further enhance the BGAN network resilience and extend the applications and capabilities of the BGAN system to take advantage of the new Alphasat satellite.

Alphasat is the first satellite to be launched using the new European high-power telecommunications platform known as Alphabus, jointly developed by Astrium and Thales Alenia Space and initiated by a partnership between ESA and CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales). The Alphabus/Alphasat activities of ESA are implemented within the framework of element 8 of the ARTES programme.

Juan Rivera Castro, ESA Technical Officer in charge of the BGAN Extension projects and now responsible for the development activities associated to the ground segment of Alphasat stated: “The BGAN system provides on a global scale the most advanced communication services to mobile users on planes, vessels and on land. BGAN has demonstrated its capabilities to support communications in harsh conditions and emergency scenarios.”

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Published 01 September 2010
Last updated at 06 August 2014 - 10:38