India moves closer to attaining self-reliance in telecom services
India edged closer to attaining total self-sufficiency in telecommunication services with the successful launch of its latest indigenous satellite, Insat-2D, yesterday by European rocket Ariane from Kourou in French Guyana.
The 2079-kg satellite was blasted into space 28 minutes after a spectacular lift-off from the Atlantic coast.
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The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said the satellite is now going around the earth once in 10-and-a-half hours, in an elliptical orbit with a perigee (distance closest to earth) of 200 km and an apogee of 35,000 km.
Isro said that an on-board motor will be fired for the first time at 6 am in the first of a series of steps to put the spacecraft in its assigned parking slot in the geostationary orbit over the equator.
Describing the event as a copy book launch and very significant for India, Isro chairman Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan said The launch is a major step in augmenting our telecommunication and mobile telephone services.
The mobile satellite service (MSS) transponder will enable the department of telecommunications (DoT) to offer the mobile telephone service over the Indian subcontinent by July-end, outstripping a similar service offered by Inmarsat.
Insat-2D carries 23 transponders to provide television and telephone services.
The MSS facility on-board, along with a similar transponder on-board Insat-2C, will pick radio signals from the ground and transmit them back. This would enable anybody with a portable briefcase-sized terminal to make or receive voice calls and transmit fax and data from anywhere in the country.
The hand-held system developed by the Centre for Telematics (C-DoT), along with the U S company `Comsat, will also find use in ships, trains and vehicles.
The broadcast satellite service (BSS) transponder will be useful for television agencies to transmit images and sound to their production centres even from remote areas. The transponder will pick signals sent by portable dish antennae and transmit these to production centres located thousands of kilometers away.
A combination of C-band and S-band facilities, the MSS transponder can pick signals not only from over the Indian mainland, but also from nearby islands such as the Anadaman and Nicobar.
The six extended C-band transponders will give a wider coverage, from South-East Asia to West Asia, for Doordarshan programmes.
A few extended C-band terminals will support the Vsat enterprises under the `remote area business message network. These transponders will enhance the capacity of this space segment, enabling it to support 1,000 Vsats by the year-end.
The extended C-band will enable organisations to establish intranets, connecting all their offices and branches located at different places. This network can be used to receive from and send to anywhere, voice, fax and data, without depending on the DoT network.
The major users of this facility would be NTPC, GAIL, NPC, Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), ONGC and NSE. A number of captive government networks also operate in this segment.
DoT recently licensed a few private service providers to offer value added services to the public using extended C-band.
Also functioning in the C-band are 87 Vsats for remote and rural area communications with another 41 terminals in various stages of implementation. Another 350 terminals are expected to be commissioned by the year end.
To add on to these are the over 50 Vsats for high speed Vsat network (HVNET) and over 700 microterminals for the National Informatics Network (Nicnet).
The three Ku-band transponders on-board the satellite will provide exclusive coverage to the metropolitan cities for Doordarshans use. These three transponders, along with the three aboard Insat-2C, will give better efficiency to the already beaming metro channels.
Besides, there will be 12 transponders in the C-band spectrum which can be used for transmitting television signals over the Indian sub-continent.
This will enhance the efficiency of Doordarshan coverage over the Indian land mass.
Isro sources said final allocation of transponders had not been decided yet. The Insat Coordination Committee (ICC) would meet soon to finalise the allocation between the ministry of information and broadcasting, DoT and other user agencies.
Although there had been enquiries from private television channels for leasing out transponders, Isro has made it clear that it was not in a position to offer transponders to private agencies at present as the full requirement of government agencies had not been met.
The first satellite in which Isro is to offer transponders for lease is Insat-2E - to be launched next year. A $110 million lease contract was signed by Isro with intelsat last year for the lease of 11 transponders for a period of 10 years.