More than 130 delegates from Europe as well as Canada, the United States, Japan, China and United Arab Emirates attended the two-day event which took place at ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
"There was a nice balance of people from inside and well as outside of Europe,” said Michèle Le Saux, Head of ESA Telecom's Ground Segment Technology Section and organiser of the forum. “We also had a good mix of operators and equipment manufacturers as well as a few representatives from the terrestrial telecoms market, which allowed for some interesting discussion and good debate.”
The forum was divided into five sessions. Session One focused on Satellite Mobile Networks and included presentations from Inmarsat, MBCO, S2M, Wavebender, Solaris and ERA. Session Two discussed Ka-Band Broadband to Consumers Networks and included presentations from Eutelsat, SES, Avanti, Viasat, STM, and Newtec. Session three discussed Mesh Networking, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Global System for Mobile communications (GSM). Presentations in this session were given by Transcore, Siemens/Nokia, iDirect, Datac Control International and STM. Session Four was dedicated to relevant Open Standards for Satellite Telecoms with presentations from Avanti, Eutelsat, TeamCast, STiMi, Motorola and TNO. Session Five contained a series of invited speakers which included Tim Farrar of TMF, Ramon Segura of NATO and Julian Sesena of the ISI Steering Committee.
Michèle Le Saux says she would like to see a similar forum repeated, perhaps with different themes. “It would be interesting to have a forum dedicated to terrestrial and satellite convergence. There is quite a bit to discuss in this area.”
To download the presentations given at the forum, click on the agenda link located under related links in the right column of this page.
