Castaway

IT MANAGER AND PRODUCER GARY Marshall had faced tough assignments before, working on the road with TV news crews. He had helped set up an editing suite in a Fijian hotel on a TV shoot.

But Marshall knew something special was required to provide communications for his production company, Lion TV, when it decided to produce the second series of Castaway for the BBC on an island in New Zealand.

“I was in a remote location, we were going to be there for more than four months with 150 staff, there was no comms here at all and I needed to provide phones and Internet access.”

When shooting news in remote locations, Marshall had been able to transmit data over the in-house transmission equipment used to broadcast video. Marshall searched for a company in New Zealand that could give him a portable satellite dish, Internet access, a small IP-PBX and IP handsets, but no single provider could do the lot. Marshall was lucky to find Australian Satellite Services, which sent a 1.8-metre dish, a satellite modem, a Quadro2x IP-PBX (by Epygi Technologies) and Snom and Aastra desk IP phones.

ASC sourced equipment from Alloy Computer Products, the Melbourne-based vendor of VoIP equipment. ISPhone, a Sydney-based ITSP was used to set up a business-grade VoIP account.

“The set-up was pretty straightforward. It was in a flight case and out of the flight case came a piece of Cat 5. I plugged the dish in, plugged into my network and away I went.”

The deal with ASC gave a flat rate for all data over the satellite connection, which guaranteed 512kb but could burst to 1Mb. VoIP calls terminated in Sydney where ASC gave a discounted rate for international calls, half of which were to local suppliers in New Zealand and the others to the UK.

Lion TV paid ASC $4000 a month to rent the equipment and $1000 a month for data. The whole set-up — satellite, network and IP-PBX — worked so well that, after installation, Marshall could get on with relaxing on the remote island.

But Marshall said the satellite phones suffer the problems of all mobile phones – they need to be recharged regularly because of poor battery life,
“It’s just a normal office situation in terms of the network. It’s mainly email traffic and FTP traffic, small files,” said Marshall. Video footage was transmitted using a separate broadcast satellite system.

The calls were much cheaper. Outgoing calls are US$1 a minute, and land line calls from the UK to sat phones can be as much as £6-7 a minute. ASC charged international VoIP calls at around 12 cents a minute.

“It’s just a normal office situation in terms of the network.”

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