YOU CANT OPERATE IF YOU CANT COMMUNICATE (It’s our motto!)

Reliable communications are critical to First Responders; your mission depends on it. Whether responding to a planned event, a natural disaster or other emergency, satellite communications provides a highly reliable and effective path to communicate.When a disaster strikes, often times power and terrestrial infrastructure are compromised and unavailable. Think of the recent Hurricane Matthew. It devastated the southeastern United States with many areas still flooded and without power. The locations where First Responders are needed are the same places without a reliable means of communication. Traditional communication pathways can be impacted for long periods of time and first responders simply cannot wait until they are restored to provide the critical communications their mission requires. Mobile Operations Center's equipped with a VSAT communications package can establish those critical communications paths in mere minutes.

FLEXIBILITY OF COMMUNICATIONS PLAN

You can’t always predict when and where an event will occur, so your communications plan has to be just as flexible. Satellite backhaul provides that flexibility. If your communications plans rely solely on cellular to provide backhaul, what do you do when you are required to provide service in an area underserved by cellular coverage? Even the most robust cellular providers can only provide service to approximately 75% of the US land mass. That leaves quite a bit of uncovered area.There are dozens of satellites in service today that provide complete coverage over the United States making availability near 100%. Although seen as a redundancy offering, in times where cellular coverage is unavailable or traditional communications are lost, satellite becomes the imperative means of communication and an operational necessity.

TIMES OF HIGH CONTENTION

Pre-planned events usually mean large crowds and high contention for available cellular services. Just about every adult, and most young adults, have a cell phone. The influx of social media and live streaming means there is more and more competition for available cellular services. A satellite link can be integrated into your communications infrastructure and be engineered to be the primary link during times of high contention.

DECREASED COST OF SATELLITE SERVICE

Historically, satellite communications were only available for organizations with large operational budgets. Today, technology advances have resulted in increased throughput over satellite while also decreasing the cost, size, weight and power needs for VSAT hardware making it affordable for even the most budget constrained groups. Bandwidth sharing technologies allow multiple agencies to share a larger bandwidth pool, reducing the overall cost for access while maintaining realized throughput to the individual end users.PEAKE’s Tactical-IP service offerings are based on infrastructure using a multi-satellite platform with geographically diverse teleports, redundant terrestrial interconnects and multiple Internet entry points. Tactical-IP is 'Public Safety' affordable and provides reliable comms. Learn more about Tactical IP here.As cleanup from Hurricane Matthew continues and towns start to rebuild, First Responder agencies and the Federal Government (FEMA) will take a look at what worked, what didn't, where and why- in terms of communications. As with every major disaster, lessons will be learned. The reliability and the increased throughput capacity of satellite combined with competitive pricing make satellite an ideal communication resource for first response- and one that is necessary when all else fails.