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A shift is emerging in the teleport business as operators are moving from just offering uplink services to offering more complete solutions to their customers.
The shift is highlighted in a report from the World Teleport Association (WTA) that establishes a series of benchmarks for the industry. The report, "Sizing the Teleport Market," highlights the revenues, geographic distribution, purchasing power and labor requirements of the teleport sector., and is the first of its kind, the WTA said.
WTA Executive Director Robert Bell spoke with Satellite News Editor Gregory Twachtman to discuss the report and other issues related to the teleport sector. Here is what he had to say:
Satellite News: When you were pulling together the data for the report, were there any data points that surprised you?
Robert Bell: The raw count was just an interesting exercise because it has never been done before. We went to all the published sources we could find, plus our own proprietary lists and tried to get rid of all the duplications and actually looked at each of these records to make sure the teleport was really there, because inevitably, people who are good marketers are going to claim they have facilities in places where what they really have is Earth stations in somebody else's teleport.
When we ended up with our count of about 830 teleports worldwide, it was not as much surprising as it was interesting because we had been using the round number of 900 to1,000 facilities. The biggest surprise was that the actual number was pretty close.
Satellite News: Did assembling the report reveal any significant trends in the teleport market?
Bell: The days of the plain vanilla uplink are dead. You could make money for a while in this industry in the late 1970s and 1980s just doing uplinking. You really can't do that anymore. The uplinking becomes a fundamental platform that you build value-added services on top of and offer a more complete service to the customer.
What we are seeing certainly in the teleport sector, and I also see signs of it in...