Kelowna Airport Case Study

The Kelowna International Airport located in Kelowna, British Columbia, serves over one million passengers a year. Located in South Central British Columbia, approximately 400 km from Vancouver, this region is home to many world-class golf resorts, wineries, andski resorts. After numerous problems with the local Fibre connection that served the administration in the Kelowna International Airport, management decided that they could not risk losing an internet connection that would affect their operation.

The airport administration contacted Omega Communications, a Galaxy Value Added Reseller (VAR), to provide the airport with an emergency back-up system. With the direct fibre line being the only connection into the airport, any disruption would shut down the airport communications for all flights. Omega Communications installed a 1.2 meter Ka-band satellite using the Galaxy SKYDATA network, along with a SkyVOICE Voice Over IP (VoIP) phone line. The service is on permanent standby for their emergency communications and is set as a hot failover through their router. This is set as Pay Per Use billing. In the case of an extended emergency, the airport will contact Galaxy to quickly upgrade their service that will allow them to increase the current bandwidth usage to resume full operation and add up to 8 phone lines.

Project Opportunity

This project can be duplicated in any community. Galaxy Broadband also provides satellite internet for weather conditions and photos of un-manned NAV Canada Airports in rural and northern regions of Canada. Contact the local airport administrators to present them this emergency backup plan for the internet and telephone. If you would like some assistance with this project please contact Galaxy.