RAD Partners with Inmarsat to Provide High Quality Voice over BGAN Services

16th May 2007: RAD Data Communications announced today that it has been appointed by Inmarsat as a solutions partner for the Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) service.

BGAN is the world's first mobile communications service to provide simultaneous voice and broadband data through a truly portable device. Easy to carry and quick to deploy, BGAN is also the first mobile service to offer guaranteed data rates on demand. These innovations enable BGAN to extend the boundaries of the broadband mobile office, establishing connectivity in areas with unreliable, insecure or non-existent terrestrial networks.

"The unique Vmux voice trunking gateway family is especially designed to allow maritime facilities, the oil and gas industry, broadcasters, disaster recovery teams, and the military to increase the amount of calls that can be transferred on limited satellite bandwidth, so more bandwidth can be made available for data or additional voice lines," explains Asaf Wachtel, Vmux Product Line Manager at RAD Data Communications. "When you pick up a phone anywhere in the world that's connected via a Vmux to BGAN, the quality of the connection will be the same as if you're picking up a phone on your office desk."

Vmux voice trunking gateways use state-of-the-art voice codecs, silence suppression and RAD's unique TDMoIP multiplexing to minimise the bandwidth required for voice transmission without affecting existing features such as fax, modem, interactive voice response (IVR), and voice mail. As a result, the Vmux is able to fit four voice channels comfortably into a 32 kbps IP-streaming BGAN service and a full E1 into a 128 kbps service. "This technology allows RAD to achieve higher bandwidth savings than VoIP solutions while maintaining a higher voice quality than that offered by typical 4 kbps VSAT codecs," Wachtel notes. "In addition, the Vmux is transparent to all telephony features, such as signaling, and compatible with all existing PBX systems," he continues. "Voice services, therefore, can be added over BGAN with a simple configuration and without any special integration effort."

BGAN enables users to connect via their laptop to their corporate network at speeds up to half a megabit per second for standard data applications. For applications where quality of service is paramount, it has the unique capability to provide guaranteed data rates on demand up to 256 kbps. The range of terminals suit single users and small teams who may need to establish a temporary office for longer periods. Users can remotely access all their desktop applications – including e-mail and the Internet – a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection, and also make telephone calls at the same time.

RAD will present its Vmux voice trunking solutions at Inmarsat regional partners conferences in Miami in May and in Bangkok in June. The two companies will also be exhibiting together at the Norshipping exhibition in Oslo in June.