History

SatGate started in November 2001 by provision of satellite Internet services within territory of Central and Eastern Europe via Sirius-West satellite of the Swedish operator and a satellite capacity owner - Nordic Satellite (NSAB). After Sirius West de-orbiting service has been moved to geostationary NSAB satellites: Sirius-2 and Sirius-3. As a result of the three-year dynamic development as an Internet via Satellite operator SatGate became one of the powerful players on the Eurasian satellite Internet market and worked on its reputation of the reliable partner for its customers, setting main focus on ISPs and corporate market.

By September, 2004 SatGate has served about one hundred Internet providers, many commercial and industrial enterprises as well as scientific and educational institutions in more than fifteen countries of Eurasian continent. Reacting to the market demands and in the move to differentiate services SatGate has developed proprietary technologies to serve SOHO and end-users.

Thus in October, 2004 SatGate has made a new step in its development by extending spectrum of services to the end-user level combined with the possibility of calculating charges depending on the volume of the information obtained. Currently SatGate provides a wide selection of tariff packages for accounts with the Committed Information Rate (CIR) or dynamic bandwidth allocation (CIR/BURST), limited and unlimited accounts.

In the year of 2005 SatGate started providing iDirect service via HellasSat satellite which developed into installation of own HUB in 2007 in our teleport in Vilnius. SatGate has developed unique DualSat technology allowing usage of two satellites for single iDirect link. In 2006 SatGate started occasional TV translation services from own TV studio. In 2007 S.N.G services were started in Baltic region. For more than seven years SatGate has been successfully penetrating new markets bringing quality satellite internet connectivity services into different countries. Presently SatGate provides satellite internet connectivity services in over 15 countries selling about 700 Mbit/s of CIR bandwidth. This is done via geostationary satellites operated by SES Sirius, Intelsat, Gascom, SES Astra and HellasSat. Marketing geography is determined by the nominal coverage of the above satellites: Eastern European, CIS, the Middle Eastern, Asian and the Caucasus countries. The service is provided mostly to the ISP and big enterprise target audience with committed information rate (CIR) bandwidth ranging from 128Kbps to 90Mbps.

In 2008 SatGate developed own RipFrame receiver which opened possibility of receiving up to 90Mbps using just one set of equipment and started FrameRelay over DVB-S2 services via Yamal-200 satellite. At the same time SatGate’s software developers produced SlonAX Internet accelerator and traffic compression utility allowing Home and corporate users fully utilize satellite downlink using just GPRS as a request channel.

SatGate main Network Operation Centre is located in Kaliningrad region, Russia (former territory of German Eastern Prussia with Koenigsberg as the capital) bordering Poland and Lithuania. Lithuanian office operating SatGate’s teleport and is located in Vilnius .

Teleports and service platforms

In October 2001 SatGate’s first POP in Europe was established in Stockholm, Sweden, where with cooperation of Nordic Satellite (NSAB) uplink was set up for running services over two Nordic Satellite (NSAB) satellites (Sirius-2 and Sirius-3) and serving ISPs in Eastern Europe and CIS Countries. IP connectivity is provided via international carriers TeliaSonera and British Telecom, as well as Swedish provider IPOnly.

In March 2003 another POP was established in Europe (the Netherlands) in cooperation with Xantic B.V. with an uplink to Intelsat-601 satellite located at 64E. Since one and a half year of operation satellite was replaced by Intelsat-702. IP connectivity is provided via links to TeliaSonera and KPN Eurorings. Complete equipment set based on Cisco platforms installed is capable to provide up to 800 Megabits of IP service in both DVB-IP and HSSI Frame Relay encapsulations. Terrestrial access is provided by double redundant STM-4 fibre ring. Most customers of this service are ISPs located in CIS, Middle East and Caucasus countries.

In June 2004 third POP was established in Vilnius (Lithuania). Facilities were built and now are being operated solely by SatGate. Teleport has independent IP carrier connections to TeliaSonera, Teo, Linx Telecom and Level3. Having its own dedicated developer groups both on hardware and software side allows SatGate to maintain constant development of existing technologies and work on new generations of them. It helps to cover wider customer base with different requirements.