The Hindu Business Line : Exiting lease pacts with foreign satellites

PROBABLY for the first time in several years, the Department of Space has turned satellite capacity-positive in the C-band. It has vacated the entire transponder capacity it had leased from Thai provider Shin Satellite.

The capacity of seven C-band transponders leased on Shin's Thaicom-3 satellite - in use since 1998 - was returned on December 23 last. ISRO has also stopped using Intelsat's IS 702 and will be getting off it in February this year, when the one-year lease period expires, senior ISRO officials said.

"Although our payment was made till February, we have not been using it (IS 702) and the transponders have been switched off for some time now," they told Business Line.

The end of lease of these 23 transponders means a saving of Rs 5-6 crore each or a total of $23 million (approximately Rs 104.8 crore) every year.

With 132 transponders from five functional communications satellites - including the latest Insat 3E, 3A, 3C, 3B and 2E launched in 1999 - the national space agency today operates the world's largest domestic satellite system. ISRO is now comfortably placed, especially in the C-band, the officials said. This is after discounting the 11 transponders of 2E that have been leased to Intelsat till 2008-09.

"We started leasing transponders only because of additional demand," the ISRO spokesman said. "As in the case of mobile phones, nobody foresaw the kind of growth that private Vsats (very small aperture terminals) and private broadcast channels saw while ISRO was catering to minimal needs of government bodies such as Doordarshan and DoT. Vsats, for instance, grew from 1,000 to 20,000 in three years."

The Insat 3 series started somewhat noticing the trends and fitted the spurting demands. "Before we started planning for the 4 series (coming up later this year,) we discussed the requirements with various user groups. The new satellites will reflect the new demands," the officials said.

The more recently introduced Ku band, however, continues to be deficit. The capacity has been borrowed on US commercial satellite GE-1A. The officials said the scene would change when Insat-4A, planned with 12 Ku band transponders and targeted at mainly DTH and Vsat users of Ku band, is launched around October this year.

By 2007, ISRO is looking at having 250 transponders in various bands on its Insat system. This, it says, would be meeting a demand of up to 11 gbps.