The benefits are clear when you do the sums. Let’s say your company wants streaming media content delivered to its 691 separate field offices. That’s about $1.4 million in monthly fees if you use standard telco high-speed lines. A satellite broadcast network could deliver comparable service for less than $34,000 (£21,244) per month, reducing your cost from over $16 million to $400,000 annually.
That’s the cost benefit. Now let’s look at the network availability benefit. Say you’re sending financial information to each of your 691 locations. A large file of financial information is bandwidth-intensive, and may take an hour to send. With point-to-point circuits such as telco lines, files are often distributed one after the other. Sending information that way would take 691 hours to reach the remote locations. With a satellite broadcast network, all sites get the content at the same time. In this case, they receive it in one hour. That’s the advantage of point-to-multipoint content delivery.
Satellites in use
How are companies using satellite networks to deliver applications? Here are just a few examples.
Distance learning
If you have a geographically scattered sales force, ongoing product and related training can be a nightmare. Sales associates can be based in home offices, headquarters, regional offices, or call in from the road.
In one case, a company with an 8,000-person sales force continually introduced new products and services to its salespeople. Employees were trained on a rotating 60- to 90-day basis. Historically, the company gathered its employees at a central training location for this ongoing education, and then sent them back to the field. Every training session cost the company approximately $500,000. With distance learning delivered to remote locations by satellite, the company almost cut out completely any need for centralized training. Even better, the sales associates had more time to spend with customers.
