Newtec with Sat3Play combined VoIP services and Direct-to-Home television services

Newtec, a global industry leader shaping the future of satellite communications, is celebrating its success after shipping 100,000 award-winning Sat3Play terminals.Offering state-of-the-art products and scalable, integrated solutions for broadcast, broadband access and backbone and trunking applications, Newtec helps customers achieve greater efficiency, increase performance and expand market reach.

Newtec has been working closely with the European satellite provider SES ASTRA to deliver its Sat3Play HUBs and terminals for SES ASTRA's successful interactive broadband service ASTRA2Connect.The core of the Sat3Play system is a DVB-S2 Hub that enables the provisioning of both basic and complex services to consumer and business markets. The Sat3play Hub has been designed in order to be highly scalable for both traffic and management aspects, supporting a wide and growing range of multimedia, data and voice applications.ASTRA2Connect has more than 75.000 end-users in Europe today and was rated best satellite based broadband service by leading German independent consumer magazine, Stiftung Warentest.

Newtec's low-cost, Ka-band-ready future-proof Sat3Play terminal includes both FlexACM technology and the revolutionary 4CPM modulation and coding scheme, which substantially increases the speed and bandwidth efficiency of the total system.Sat3Play is a perfect fit for both the consumer and enterprise markets.The Sat3Play terminal implements the most efficient technologies such as DVB-S2 modulation in the forward link, rain fade countermeasures in the return link and IP traffic enhancement software such as TCP acceleration, pre-fetching and encryption.This achievement in Europe is being successfully leveraged in many other regions with customers including HellasSat, IPCopter and Ghana-based K-NET. Sat3Play is now also in use in Africa and the Middle East too.

Sat3Play can be combined with VoIP and Direct-to-Home television services and supports a large variety of professional applications such as for the maritime, energy, transport and security markets. The terminals can be set up quickly and easily using Newtec's Point&Play self-installation capability.Point&Play, a patent pending technology from Newtec, is an innovative self-installation system available on Sat3Play satellite broadband access terminals. The system consists of an antenna pointing tool (shipped with every terminal), combined with advanced software embedded in the indoor modem. It allows the installer (be it a professional installer or the end-user) to easily position the antenna correctly by identifying the satellite and providing feedback on both signal quality and lock. It does not require any software to be installed on the end-users' computer.

A Sat3Play system is a modular platform designed for

• "Grow-as-you-go" network modularity
  
• Scalable from 500 to 160,000 users per hub
  
• Single or Multi-Service provider platform
  
• Highly reliable and low cost terminal
  
• Easy & fast end-user terminal installation
  
• Dual or Triple play support
  
• End-to-end Multiple QoS mechanisms
  
• Industry-leading traffic acceleration & compression techniques
  

Applications

• Consumer internet access
  
• Corporate Networking
  
• VoIP telephony
  
• Content distribution and Management
  
• Telemetry (SCADA)
  
• Point of sales terminals (POS)
  

Newtec's Sat3Play technology is also used for connecting thousands of remote sites as with SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) where the system is being used to provide a sophisticated monitoring and forecasting capability for Italy's gas and electricity authority.The Sat3Play Broadband Terminal is a state-of-the-art, high performance equipment package designed to provide high-speed satellite internet access for the consumer, small office and home office markets. Sat3Play allows ISPs or other IP based service providers to address their market with a truly viable business model. The Sat3Play terminal is capable of supporting a full range of IP services, such as VoIP, multicasting and intranet services.

With its passionate commitment to R&D and its strong relationship with the European Space Agency (ESA), Newtec remains in the forefront of technological development, continuing the pioneering contributions that have led to industry standards including DVB, DVB-S2, DVB RCS and iSatTV Cenelec pr EN50478.

Newtec's worldwide customer base includes the industry's most prestigious broadcasters, satellite operators, telcos, systems houses and broadcasting unions. Established in 1985 and headquartered in Belgium, Newtec has regional offices as well as additional R&D centres located in Stamford, Conn. (U.S.), Singapore (Singapore), Beijing (China), Dubai (UAE), São Paulo (Brazil), Berlin (Germany) and France.

ASTRA Broadband Services is a 100% owned subsidiary of SES ASTRA operating SES ASTRA's satellite broadband access ASTRA2Connect (http://www.astra2connect.com/).ASTRA2Connect is a bi-directional satellite broadband service, providing households and companies in regions without terrestrial broadband networks a reliable and low-cost access to the broadband internet as well as VoIP telephony and TV reception.

ASTRA2Connect is today available in over 20 European countries and has already more than 75,000 customers. With speeds of up to 6 Mb/s in download and easily installable hardware components, ASTRA2Connect has become the most successful satellite-based residential broadband network in Europe.

With extensive know-how in the residential market, ABBS has developed the service further to offer customers from the energy, security and transportation industries an attractive and cost-efficient possibility to implement their SCADA applications. Using specially designed in-motion antennas, ASTRA2Connect is also used by the maritime market for low-cost access to the broadband internet.