[Satellite TODAY 06-29-10] Marlink has teamed up with Asia Broadcast Satellite (ABS) to extend its Ku-band maritime VSAT services to Hong Kong, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, Marlink announced June 28.
    The coverage expansion follows a virtual network operator agreement between the two companies that enabled Marlink to use the wide southern Ku-band beam on the ABS-1 satellite, located at 75 degrees East, which offers coverage in the Asia-Pacific region extending from Mongolia to the south of Thailand and across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Japan.
    Marlink will use the ABS-1 satellite to provide greater Ku-band coverage to its WaveCall and @SEAdirect customers in Hong Kong, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
    Separately, iDirect, SpeedCast and Eutelsat Communications have expanded the reach and capabilities of their global maritime VSAT broadband service to more than 20 Ku-band beams covering 95 percent of all major shipping lanes and offshore markets, iDirect announced June 28.
    As part of the expansion, SpeedCast and Eutelsat introduced a regional service that uses a 60-centimeter Ku-band marine antenna for smaller coastal and regional vessels. Customers of this service will be able to choose from a lineup of fixed-rate service plans for connection rates ranging from 64 kilobits per second to more than 2 megabits per second. The service includes dedicated bandwidth options to share bandwidth reliably across a wide range of applications from email and Internet access to real-time ship management software. 
    The service network is built on the iDirect platform and leverages technologies such as automatic beam switching across multiple satellite footprints, DVB-S2 encoding for bandwidth optimization and adaptive coding and modulation for optimized power utilization and performance in all weather conditions.