Haiti Earthquake Emergency Satellite Internet

VSAT Systems VAR-S - A new player in the satellite ISP industry

As a new entrant to the U.S. satellite ISP market and a previous reseller of Brand H, VAR-S was faced with several technical and customer related challenges in their first two years of operations. VAR-S clearly understood the markets it wanted to serve and the level of service it wanted to provide to its customers. However, as a reseller of a service that essentially promised a lot but did not guarantee anything, resulted in unsatisfied customers. In short, VAR-S was unable to deliver on their promises of "true broadband quality - all the time."

Challenges

  • End users were rarely able to realize speeds even close to half of the 'up-to' speeds during peak hours. This, coupled with high latency and jitter, made the connections work as promised only for web browsing and email.
  • Being a new player in the market with basic technical competencies, VAR-S  was unable to address complicated technical issues due to the absence of dedicated Tier II Tech Support from Brand H.
  • High latency of over 900 ms was compromising their ability to service customers who were VoIP users.
  • VAR-S had only one set of happy customers, the low end residential customers and were unable to fulfill requests from more profitable enterprise-class customers.
  • VAR-S, under their current provider, increasingly felt that they weren’t getting the 'whole story' from Brand H and their customers didn’t believe it either.

Solution

As most of the customers used Ku band satellite Internet access, VAR-S was quickly able to move existing customers over to the VSAT Systems network. VAR-S was able to diversify customer profiles, a good mix of residential and small businesses requiring low bandwidth to high-end business customers requiring bandwidth intensive solutions and service levels. As an established reseller, VAR-S has a full suite of product offerings including high-end plans and solutions for the Business Continuity market.

  • VAR-S now had the capabilities to offer a variety of service plans that provided multi-megabit speeds. This enabled VAR-S to fulfill requests from all types of industries and customers. The availability of CIRs guaranteed end user access speeds.
  • VAR-S had several of its customers make the switch to a better service plan which fit their requirements better.
  • Availability of a larger range of service plans, business-grade hardware and other value added integrated solutions enabled VAR-S to target newer, profitable enterprise-class markets.
  • VAR-S, with the ability to serve a broader range of customers, moved from being a low-bandwidth provider under Brand H to a complete satellite Internet solutions provider under VSAT Systems.
  • Superior network performance and latency of less than 700 ms resulted in exceptional end user experience for applications such as VoIP, streaming video and web conferencing.
  • Dedicated Tier II Tech Support and training from VSAT Systems gave VAR-S the confidence and competency to resolve technical issues in a quick and effective manner.