Q&A New Wave Ku-band satellite coverage. VSAT broadband made easy Since it was founded four years ago, NewWave Broadband has been extremely successful in the provision of specialist maritime communications. Their innovations are making VSAT broadband more accessible to shipping companies all over the world. Helen Jameson spoke to Steve McCabe, Managing Director of NewWave to discover the secret of their success and to find out more about their ambitions for the future of the VSAT broadband market. Question: Can you please begin by giving us some background on NewWave Broadband and how long the company has been established? Steve McCabe: NewWave was founded in 2005 so we have been established for four years now. We are headquartered in Edinburgh but we also have an office in South Africa which serves the land-based market. We have a total of 19 employees. We have currently got a contract running to the value of over 110 million dollars. There are over 650 vessels on the network right now and by the end of the current financial year that should be over 1,000 based on the orders that we have in place. Question: You are about to make a huge investment of US$2 million in satellite equipment. Can you tell me how you are going to be using it and what was behind the decision to invest so heavily in satel- lite and how do you believe it will help your business? Steve McCabe: The main reason for our investment in iDirect was that the fleet of vessels that I have mentioned are all operated currently on iDirect services so the decision to go ahead with a new hub and satellite capacity of Telstar 11N was to augment what we have already and to allow our customer base to move from one beam to the next. We needed that network to be compatible 40 w w w.satellite-evolution.com | May/June 2009 newwave.p65 40 14/05/2009, 14:48