Satellite News

An experiment aboard the International Space Station has begun tracking individual ships crossing the seas beneath. An experiment hosted by ESA’s Columbus module is testing the viability of monitoring global traffic from the Station’s orbit hundreds of kilometres up.

Telesat announced that Hong Kong based SpeedCast Ltd., a provider of global network solutions, has signed a multi-year agreement for capacity on the North & Central America beam of Telesat’s Telstar 11N satellite.
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SES World Skies said it has signed an agreement with Supernet Limited, a Pakistani satellite service provider, for 52 MHz of C-band transponder capacity on the NSS-12 satellite at the orbital location of 57 degrees East.
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Officials from the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Global Positioning Systems Wing announced that the first GPS IIF satellite, which was launched 27 May, has begun test transmissions of the new L5 navigation signal.

German satellite service provider atrexx has announced the launch of a trio of services aimed specifically at customers based in Africa, with additional coverage of the Middle East region.

SES Astra has entered into a distribution agreement with the Polish business data network operator NASK to offer its satellite-based broadband service Astra2Connect to business customers in the Polish market. The service is available as of now.
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Loral Space & Communications Inc. announced that Barrett Xplore Inc., Canada’s largest rural broadband provider, has elected to maximise its capacity usage on Loral’s payload on the ViaSat-1 broadband satellite.
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APT Satellite Holdings Limited (APT) announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, APT Satellite Company Limited, has recently signed a long-term transponder lease agreement on APSTAR 2R (formerly also known as Telstar 10) with HBO Asia.