We all know that broadband has moved from a nice-to-have to a have-to-have for businesses. But what happens when those businesses are too remote for affordable wired circuits — or any circuits at all? And what happens when disaster strikes and the SMBs and small enterprises that rely on data communications find themselves shut down?

The answer is, literally, cosmic: satellite service.

As astronomical as it is (think 22,000 miles in outer space), it's an answer that channel partners can increasingly and convincingly give their customers. "For agents and channels, satellite represents just another offer they can bring to their customer base, but one that differentiates," said Mike Polmar, vice president of sales at SkyPort Global Communications. "A lot of folks are already selling T1s, traditional services, voice termination and video, but there are so many market segments they're already tapping that they can go back to with a satellite story."

Satellite Sales Proposition

Take the business continuity and disaster recovery scenario, for instance. "A lot of people have diverse facilities coming in, but we've found that even if it's a diverse T1 you buy, at some point it connects through some kind of cable or fiber, and those facilities might meet or be side-by-side conduits," Polmar explained. "Satellite is a completely separate path, not beholden to the terrestrial network -- that's very attractive to companies that stand to lose large amounts of money in the event of an outage."

The fact that satellite was the only thing that worked after Hurricane Katrina has heightened satellite's profile in such situations.

Beyond disaster recovery, channel partners can solve any number of business issues with satellite. Frank Marro, program manager at Cleveland-based channel partner MCPc, said multilocation companies always should be vetted for a satellite fit. "A lot of companies may have multiple locations but are not needing a lot of bandwidth to each of them," he said. "Gas stations fit this profile; we have one account with 100 stations along an interstate, transmitting small amounts of PoS (point-of-sale) information. In some areas they can't get DSL and don't want to pay $400 for a T1. So we put in a satellite link and they aggregate the traffic across all the locations onto that, and it's very cost-effective [compared to dropping a T1 to every location]." SkyPort's sat-links start around $1,000 each.

Satellite also has the advantage of international reach. "We work with a lot of international companies, in one case a military contractor with people all over the world as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Marro. "In these types of cases,