Mentat announced Monday that NBC News, a division of General Electric, relied on Mentat's SkyX Gateway product to enhance the communications to its Middle East news bureaus during the war in Iraq.
Mentat's award-winning SkyX products overcome the limitations of the Internet Protocols to accelerate data transfers over satellite. By improving the efficiency of its satellite-based communications network, NBC was able to speed the delivery of stories and images from the local bureaus to NBC News headquarters for use in its war coverage.
To support the war coverage, NBC News connected their local news bureaus in Iraq (Baghdad), Kuwait (Kuwait City), Qatar (Doha), Jordon (Aman), and Israel (Tel Aviv) with the New York-based operations center over the Loral Skynet (NYSE: LOR) Telstar 12 satellite.
This network provided voice and video communications, file transfers, and computer connectivity, and was used by local correspondents and support staff for all communications with headquarters. Adding SkyX Gateways to this network made it possible for reporters to transmit their stories quicker and allowed the support staff to communicate with the operations center more efficiently.
"We needed to turn our satellite network into a seamless, reliable data pipe and the SkyX Gateway was able to do that for us," explained Stacy Brady, VP Network News Field Operations. "Once the SkyX Gateway was installed, we couldn't tell the difference between being physically located in Kuwait or at our headquarters. An effective, high speed data network is a big advantage in news gathering."
"We are proud that our SkyX Gateway product played an important role in the incredible coverage of the events in Iraq by NBC News," said Kay Guyer, Mentat President.
The long delay of satellite links used to connect remote or mobile locations reduces the efficiency of the Internet Protocols that transmit files, images, e-mails, Web content and other data over computer networks, causing sluggish performance and slow downloads.
The SkyX Gateway overcomes these performance limitations by combining a satellite-optimized protocol with data compression and other acceleration techniques which remain entirely transparent to end users and compatible with all applications.
