Stratos Expects Its SwiftBroadband Service to Be Ready This Autumn

Stratos Global Corp. expects its SwiftBroadband service to be commercially available in the third quarter of this year, following a second series of ground and flight tests.

Stratos is a LESO (land earth station operator) and says it is the world's largest distributor of Inmarsat mobile satellite systems.  Its SwiftBroadband service will use the small, high-power spot beams of the new Inmarsat-4 satellites to supply bandwidth comparable to that of terrestrial broadband services to passengers, cabin crew and pilots in airliners and business jets.  Its applications will include simultaneous voice and data services with data speeds approaching 432 kbps (kilo bits per second).

SwiftBroadband is the aeronautical equivalent of Inmarsat's BGAN (broadband global area network).  Inmarsat appointed Stratos, which is already a major distributor of Inmarsat's Swift64 aeronautical data service and "classic" Aero services, to be a distributor of its SwiftBroadband aeronautical data service earlier this year.

According to Stratos, SwiftBroadband will be able to use the existing satellite communications systems already installed on more than 4,000 aircraft, through upgrades of existing Inmarsat Swift64 and Inmarsat Aero H/H+ installations.

Stratos says it is the only LESO capable of reaching all Inmarsat satellites. 05-11-2007.

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