200 201 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 02-03/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 02-03/2012 — TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine • Internet and TV uplink for cruise ships • Data services for specific user groups • Uplink for many Dutch radio channels • Downlink/encoding for IPTV providers • Free capacity for additional uplink customers CASTOR: More than an Uplink Station COMPANY REPORT Satellite Uplink Station, Netherlands TELE-satellite Magazine Business Voucher www.TELE-satellite.info/12/03/castor-satellite-uplink Direct Contact to Sales Manager
Transcript
200 201TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 02-03/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 02-03/2012 — TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
202 203TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 02-03/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 02-03/2012 — TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
TV, Radio and Internet Uplinks for Europe and Africa
Edwin Cras is Managing Director of the satellite uplink station CASTOR. He is an enthusiastic satellite DXer that has been reading TELE-satellite for many years. “My first satellite dish was a 1.5-meter antenna that I installed in 1990.” Today he uses a motorized 2.0-meter antenna at home. He absolutely enjoys being at CASTOR and working with all those large dishes every day; it’s something that a private satellite DXer can only dream of.
COMPANY REPORT Satellite Uplink Station, Netherlands
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Administrative building in Burum in northern Holland, where CASTOR rents offices from Stratos.
If you ever find yourself traveling in northern Holland through the town of Burum, you won’t be able to help but notice the giant satellite antenna farm. Large 32-meter antennas stand along-side 16.4-meter dishes as well as many nine-meter antennas. There’s also a large assortment of smaller dishes of all sizes. The groundstation used to belong to the Dutch telecommunications provider KPN but is now owned by Stratos, a leading provider for Inmarsat services. Ivo Veld-kamp successfully negotiated a manage-ment buy-out in early 2005 and estab-lished CASTOR. As a result CASTOR has become an important provider at the Bu-rum Teleport together with Stratos itself.
Managing Director Edwin Cras told us more about those early days: “We start-ed with seven employees; they had con-trol over a total of six antennas: a small 4.6-meter dish, two 6.0-meter antennas and three of the large 9.0-meter giants.” The young company proved to be suc-cessful in the market and has been able to increase their sales from four million Euros back then towards almost 10 mil-lion Euros today. “We grow between 10 and 20% every year.”
Who are the heavyweights for CASTOR at the Burum Teleport? “An important part of our business is with Maritime Ser-
vice Providers,” comments Edwin Cras, “which includes for example the Miami based company MTN, one of the largest in this segment.” MTN has been using CASTOR Teleport for many years to pro-vide Internet service as well as their own onboard TV channels to cruise ships at this side of the globe. “For these custom-ers we put our largest system into ser-vice: the 16.4-meter dish that is fixed on NSS12 at 57 east.”
The 16.4-meter dish is not the only an-tenna that was added since the founding of the company; nine-meter dishes were also added. “Three of our five 9.0-meter antennas are used for the Ku-band: one is pointed to AM1 at 40E, another to ASTRA 3B at 23.5E and the third is aligned with EUTELSAT W2A at 10E.” We were sur-prised to learn what these satellites are used for; Edwin Cras explains: “They are used to provide passenger planes with Internet access so that the passengers don’t have to do without their laptops or Smartphones.” For this service CASTOR handles both the uplink and downlink In-ternet traffic, The remaining two nine-meter dishes are used for the C-band. “One of them is pointed to EXPRESS A4
at 14W while the other one is aligned with INTELSAT 906 at 64E.” Both of these up-links are used for maritime data transmis-sions. CASTOR has also been uplinking transponders for the Dutch DTH bouquet Canal Digitaal from Burum using a 9 me-ter antenna on Astra 3B.
CASTOR has been offering occasional capacity (short SNG transmissions) since 2010. “We have leased an entire tran-sponder with 54 MHz bandwidth on AM44 at 11W and use it to offer SNG transmis-sions”, Edwin Cras tells us, “One hour of transmission time with a bandwidth of 36 MHz costs 600 Euros with us.” The band-width is precisely set up for an HD chan-nel. “Customers can select the slots on their own through our online booking sys-tem”, he adds.
But CASTOR’s main source of earnings comes from ‘closed user groups’. Ed-win Cras explains what that means: “We have, for example, a European country
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1. Edwin Cras in the engineering area2. The 16.4-meter antenna is controlled from here. The satellite beacon signal receiver is at the top. In the middle is the control system for the antenna with a display of the actual value of the antenna (at the top of the display) and the desired value (at the bottom of the display) of the antenna for, in this case, the NSS-12 satellite. The LNB controller is at the bottom. If an LNB should fail, this system automatically switches over to the spare LNB.3. The labeling gives it away: the TV channels received by CASTOR from the Congo for an IPTV provider are processed here.
as a customer that wants to provide their embassies in Africa with secure Internet service.” For this customer CASTOR pro-vides the uplink and downlink Internet connection not only for their internal op-eration but also for the public Internet. “Other similar customers are mining com-panies or oil companies that want to link all of their branch offices together.” This business segment makes up about 50% of CASTOR’s total sales. Edwin Cras is ex-pecting that this will increase to 70% by 2013.
CASTOR has an ideal location in the flatlands of northern Holland: “We can see all the satellites from 70.5E to 55W.” Their Burum location is just one part of CASTOR. “We also operate another up-link station in Hilversum south of Amster-
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CASTOR uses this dish to receive the TV channels from the Congo off of the RASCOM satellite at 2E.
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dam.” This location is very active with the uplink of radio stations. He lists them: “We have been uplinking for Radio 538, Sky Radio, Veronica, Slam FM, 100%NL as well as Arrow Rock and Arrow Jazz since the early ‘90s.“ But that’s still not enough. CASTOR is developing another business sector: “We receive the satellite channels for IPTV providers who then offer them to customers via the Internet.” One of them is the IPTV provider ‘Bouquet Uhuru’ with TV channels from the Congo that CASTOR receives in the C-band from the RASCOM satellite at 2E. Another is the provider ‘Premier Satellite’ with some English lan-guage TV channels from ASTRA at 28.2E.
From the original seven employees it has become 14 and CASTOR is involved in many activities in many different ar-eas that should allow them to tackle any future opportunities. “Since we have so many antennas of different sizes available to us, we can react very quickly to any re-quests”, comments Edwin Cras and then continues, “And because of our inexpen-sive rates we are very attractive to new customers.”
1. One of CASTOR’s prominent customers is the American firm MTN. They provide cruise ships with TV and Internet services. Here we see the four-way C-band amplifiers with redundany for CASTOR’s satellite uplink with three-way redundancy.2. VSAT platform (iDirect) for one of the ‘closed user group’ customers.
