Verizon makes its satellite dishes available as standard service

Verizon announced it is turning its 19 years of responding to hurricanes and disasters with ground-based mobile satellite research into a standard service for a variety of businesses and governments.

Customers in government, retail and other businesses can set up the mobile satellite service with Verizon to gain access within 24 to 36 hours to communications trailers and other vehicles equipped with satellite dishes and data ports to be used with voice over IP phones and computers.

Those satellite dishes, in turn, communicate over a special KU satellite wireless band with a fleet of stationary satellites above Earth, which at the time communicate with a network of 10,000 terrestrial satellite bases around the globe already operated by Verizon. Verizon will next connect those mobile satellite clients to its global private IP network, which runs over a multi-protocol label switching network.

Customers can use the service to pre-arrange mobile satellite services for communications following natural and manmade disasters, however the service could be valuable, for instance, to stream IPTV video for training purposes or to multicast a live presentation at a trade show to a global audience, said Stuart Burson, group manager for Verizon's Satellite Solutions Group. The group is based in Plano, Texas, which is centrally located to make it possible for gear to reach areas within the continental U.S. within 24 hours, Burson said.

"This service gives clients another means of access to MPLS... nevertheless it takes the fixed solution and makes it mobile and gives clients the possibility to standardize the response," Burson explained. Having arranged the service in advance with a retainer fee, a customer would be first in line in an emergency to receive a variety of trailers or other vehicles equipped with satellite dishes, reducing the time to restore a network and giving a customer greater predictability with costs, he said.

Verizon has earlier worked with private businesses and governments on disaster recovery of networks, however it only provided custom solutions. Now, Verizon will work with a customer on a set of services that fit into a customer's set of master services. "That way we can have the services ready when needed and we already understand what applications need to run, what a customer's bandwidth needs are and more," Burson added.

An added benefit of the service is that it works so then within a customer's network security design, Burson said. The mobile satellite vehicle can be used to put a customer behind a corporate firewall with its own corporate security configurations, eliminating the need for each user to connect via a VPN. Should the contingency arise to the satellite connection, Verizon can arrange to have the trailer equipped with Wi-Fi for nearby users, and will assign a Verizon technician to keep the network running around the clock, Burson added.

Verizon, like other major wireless carriers, has provided free humanitarian networking services following a variety of disasters in the past two decades, including afterwards Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and afterwards the Sept. 11, 2011 World Trade Center attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing.

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed. His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.