I-4 satellite
The I-4 satellites are made up of the INMARSAT BGAN, FleetBroadband and SwiftBroadband communications network. They provide Internet and telecom connections everywhere on Earth, except in polar regions.
Data services
Two general types of data services are currently provided:
- Streaming
- Background
Streaming
Streaming is a service that guarantees the delivery of data. In this service, a terminal requests a specific bandwidth (currently available in 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or 256 kbit/s), and if the current spot beam has sufficient resources, the requested bandwidth is allocated to the terminal. For example, if a terminal requests an 8 kbit/s streaming context, it will be able to send data at 8 kbit/s consistently. Consequently, streaming services are billed based on the duration of usage.
Background
Background service is a best-effort approach to data delivery. Each spot beam provides a certain amount of usable bandwidth, and any bandwidth not used by streaming contexts is allocated for background contexts. This means that the actual bandwidth received with a background context may vary over time. The theoretical maximum bandwidth available is approximately 400 kbit/s. As a result, background contexts are billed based on data volume rather than duration of usage.