A telephone call from the Central Australian desert to Canberra yesterday marked the opening of Optus’s new Australia-wide satellite mobile telephone service, MobileSat.
The call was put through to the Minister for Communications, Michael Lee, from a phone in a car near Uluru (Ayers Rock). The signal was bounced off an Optus satellite 36,000 kilometres above the earth to a ground receiving station and into the general network.
The service is the first of its kind in the world and was designed and built in Australia. Present satellite phone services use stop-point-and-setup technology and are much more expensive. Present radio-based services are less reliable and can be intercepted easily.
Optus says it has had extensive interest from the Department of Defence and the rural, mining and fishing industries and emergency services. But it is not cheap. The car-based units will cost about $8000 and cost $45 a month and $1.80 per minute connection time. The unit will require similar installation as a car phone plus a one-metre aerial and a small electronic box in the boot.
Optus managers said that they expected the price to come down as more hand-set manufacturers entered the market. At present only NEC and Westinghouse are manufacturers.
Later this year, Optus hopes to add data and fax services to the system and a later a handset that will enable people to wander from a car or base phone.
The chair of Optus, Sir Brian Inglis, said the idea had come from Aussat which was bought by Optus as part of the $800 million package when it was given the right to set up the second network.
At the time critics described Aussat as a white elephant. Yesterday Sir Brian said it was “”nothing short of a jewel”.
Optus hopes to sell about 50,000 units in the next five years or so.
The service enables subscribers to send and receive calls from anywhere on the Australian continent and up to 200 kilometres out to sea, including the Torres Strait islands to the New Guinea coast. Subscribers will be able to connect the phone to the Global Positioning System to indicate the phone’s precise location in case of emergencies.
Optus said it had had discussions with South American, Asian and African nations to set up a similar service. Nations with poor land-line telephone services were especially interested.
Sir Brian said that, until now, rural Australia had been virtually excluded from the mobile telecommunications revolution.