PanAmSat Corporation today announced an innovative service that enables telecommunications carriers to tap into an integrated package of PanAmSat satellite and teleport services as needed to relay telephone calls between business customers in Latin America and the United States and the rest of the world. Carriers in Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador are already establishing bandwidth-on-demand type applications including private network telephony and ISDN networks using PanAmSat’s PAS-5 Atlantic Ocean Region satellite and its teleport in Homestead, Fla.
PanAmSat conducted the first demonstration of the service in early November during the Iberoamerica Presidential Summit in
Venezuela. PanAmSat’s PAS-5 Atlantic Ocean Region satellite relayed telephone calls from the Isla de Margarita to the United
States and abroad.
“PanAmSat’s new corporate telephony service is designed to provide a value-added voice and high-speed data
communications service for telecommunications carriers and their business customers in Latin America,” said Alvaro T.
Gazzolo, PanAmSat’s regional vice president, Latin America. “The new service is cost-effective, flexible and easy to use,
essentially creating for carriers a virtual private telephony network. Carriers only pay for satellite capacity based on the number
of minutes of traffic that is actually transmitted over the satellite, so more end-users and carriers, for whom satellite
communications may have been cost-prohibitive, can take advantage of what is an ideal service offering for them.
“PanAmSat is uniquely capable of offering this bundled package of services because of our satellite and ground-based
capabilities serving the Americas,” Gazzolo added. “We expect that the PAS-5 satellite, our latest and most powerful ever
serving the region, will be particularly popular for this application because of its single-beam coverage of the Americas with
access to Europe in conjunction with new technologies such as demand assigned multiple access.”
Through strategic alliances with local carriers in Latin America, PanAmSat’s bundled corporate telephony service provides local
access for businesses in country, international satellite capacity and U.S. teleport services as well as international gateway
switching and termination of minutes worldwide.
Transmissions over PAS-5 are made over the C-band Americas beam, which provides comprehensive coverage of the
Americas with European access. PAS-5, which contains 24 C-band and 24 Ku-band transponders, was launched on August
27 and commenced commercial service in early October. PAS-5 is PanAmSat’s 16th satellite and its fifth serving Latin
America.
PanAmSat plans to launch five additional satellites by late 1998, including the Galaxy VIII-i satellite in December 1997.
