All,

What is the deal with Bentley Walker? My company recently acquired a contract with them on a military base in Afghanistan.

- I spoke with them initially to renegotiate the pricing and was told after some back and forth that we were already receiving the best pricing. I since took out a distributor contract with Skylogic (where BW is reselling) and found that the entry level pricing is around 50% of BW's retail.

- The IP's they give us are all 10.* and our uplink is a 192.168.* . Is there no way to get public IP's with this service? We would like to manage the router from our NOC in the U.S.

- What is the deal with this "Web Accelerator," is it some type of proxy? Is there a way to bypass it?


On the topic of distribution, does anyone know of any other VSAT resale outfits similar to Skylogic that we could use? Their pricing and offerings seem perfect, not to mention we could really streamline the process of switching from BW but the process of getting started is extremely slow. We send the NDA, contracts, etc. and have been waiting a week to hear back from legal about an issue with our bank guarantee.

Long story short we're looking to get into the VSAT resale business without a lot of hassle. We have 3 HX50's with BW currently and could probably push out onto other bases with relative ease.

Bentley Walker are the only HX NOC operators outside of the USA for the regions you're talking about.

And since the topic has come about would like to clarify a few points.

They do not buy bandwidth from Skylogic and resell it

You must know they run their own NOCs and it can be checked as well.

SkyLogic is only doing the hosting and the internet backbone

This is not even 10% of the game. The whole effort comes from bandwidth management, fair access policy, delivering the grades of services

So in short, no shortcuts, unless you would be wanting to invest in a HX NOC and run it off some teleport

Regards

To deathnova

Please contact Bentley Walker, tel: +44 2392 311 103, who operate the HX hubs, and ask about getting public IP addresses forwarded to your three sites.

If you are wanting to do your own thing you need to realise the high costs involved in getting started.  If you want a shared network you might consider buying an iDirect VNO hub, hosting it at some teleport, paying for 1 Mbit/s download and 256k upload and sharing this amongst several customer sites.  If you have a limited number of sites requiring dedicated access then you might alternatively consider SCPC modems (e.g. Comtech CDM570). You need to lease satellite capacity and also get modem hosting at some teleport.

The HX system is suitable for large networks offering a variety of tariffs, each according to customer needs. These customer needs can range from a home user on minimum tariff to large business networks with high traffic loading, multiple sites and mesh connectivity.

There is a new announcement coming soon to this forum from Nynex who are offering 1024up/4096down for $7000 per month on W48 in inclined orbit. This low price is on account of the inclined orbit and satellite remaining life 2 years estimated.  The penalty is that you need a 2.4m tracking antenna etc at each site, approx $32,000 each.  You could operate 3 sites, with say 4096 shared outlink and 3 dedicated SCPC carriers back to the teleport (341kbit/s each). In such a dedicated system you could connect perhaps 100 PCs at each of the three sites.
 
Best regards, Eric.

Eric,

Thanks for the reply. We are most certainly aware of the high costs associated with any telecommunications venture, our company leases space from major facilities in the U.S. and has a five figure space and bandwidth costs as a result. Nonetheless, this is for terrestrial based services that we provide and not satellite.

What we're looking at right now is a deal with Skylogic that would let us sell systems one by one at a rate substantially more competitive than what we're currently paying now if we were to change our systems from HX50 to Viasat.

Skylogic operate ViaSat Linkstar hub/service, so you may well be able to resell that equipment/service.

I tried to do just what you are trying to do, but they refused to supply me, saying I was too small !

I wish you good luck with the contract.  Be careful with the LinkStar modems - never get the coax cables crossed over and keep the LinkStar modems cool.

Best regards, Eric.

Skylogic already has all of our paperwork and based on my discussion with the account executive there should not be any issues. Right now we're just waiting on legal review, mostly because I told them the bank guarantee would be U.S. when the contract requires a EU bank and then of course we would need to get the Viasat modems which is about a month delay at this location.