Entrepreneurial Dominion

     David Dague

There Aren't Any Backhoes in Space

Tachyon Networks has figured out how to deliver reliable, high-speed Internet service over satellites. Now it's targeting companies that need bandwidth in remote locations or back-up for vulnerable land lines.

The United States military arguably operates the most robust telecommunications system in the world – it’s unsurpassed in everything from piloting unmanned aircraft to coordinating combined-arms assaults upon the enemy. But when it comes to doing something seemingly simple, like setting up Internet cafes for the troops in Iraq, sometimes it has to call in the civilians.

The Middle East has been a growth market for Vienna-based Tachyon Networks, a provider of broadband satellite connections. Off-duty soldiers can’t get enough of the Internet. They love surfing the Web, swapping e-mail with loved ones and posting photos on their military unit websites. Tachyon provides portable, generator-sized routers and satellite dishes capable of delivering high-bandwidth service via satellite; military units can lug them wherever they go.

“They’re great for morale. These things are running at full T-1 speed, twenty-four/seven,” says David Dague, vice president-strategic marketing. “The Internet cafes have lines out the door. … We get requests every week from a battalion parked next to another battalion that’s got one of our units, and they want one, too. … We’re pushing 200 over there.”

Business is good these days for Tachyon, which has solved a problem that has bedeviled the major satellite companies: how to establish high-quality, high-bandwidth Internet connections via satellites. For a variety of technical reasons, Internet protocol and satellites don’t play well together. By devising ingenious ways to work around the problems, Tachyon now finds itself in the enviable position of having no effective competitors -- and it’s racing to make the most of it.

Tachyon sells its broadband service not only to Internet cafes in war zones, but to any outfit – offshore oil rigs, railroad switching yards, Third World factories, emergency response teams – that requires high-speed Internet access far from land-line connections. It’s a niche market, but in the multibillion-dollar market for telecommunications services, it’s a very big niche. The company has plenty of room to grow.

Tachyon was founded in 1997 by a group of satellite, Internet, and data networking engineers who shared the vision of delivering broadband Internet by satellite. TCP-IP, the technology that breaks communications into discrete packets of information, ships them via land or wireless connections, and reassembles them at their destination, was not designed with the challenges of satellite communications in mind, Dague explains. Fluctuations in the atmosphere create a lot of “noise" that disrupts Internet packets, while the 44,000-mile round trip -- to the satellite, back to earth, and back the other way -- creates a half-second time lag, known as “latency,” that plays havoc with TCP-IP’s method for confirming that the packets have been delivered.

Those problems are compounded by customer demands for secure transmission of information. Encryption technologies make the packets bigger and more cumbersome, magnifying the atmospheric and latency issues by a factor of three or four. Bottom line: Top data-transmission speeds over a satellite aren’t much better than those of a consumer telephone connection.

Tachyon’s founders bypassed these problems with a set of clever fixes. They devised signal-processing technologies that coutered the vagaries of atmospheric conditions. They created their own proxy Internet protocol that eliminated the effects of latency. And they invented techniques for accelerating the transmission of encrypted traffic. Then they bundled the technologies and branded it as their “T Force” satellite broadband “performance optimizer.”

T-Force provides 99.9 percent reliability, Dague asserts – a hair less than a terrestrial connection but far better than any other broadband satellite service. Indeed, Tachyon is so confident of its ability to deliver fast, reliable connections that it is the only satellite service provider willing to offer a service guarantee.

Tachyon has identified three main markets for T-Force. The first is serving remote locations beyond the reach of land-based, fiber-optic cable. Many multinational corporations have manufacturing facilities in Third World countries where the terrestrial telecommunications infrastructure does not exist. But no one can function in a globally integrated supply chain anymore without access to high-speed Internet connections. In cases like these, Tachyon offers the best available solution.

A second market is serving temporary locations that may be located near land lines but it isn’t worth the trouble to dig a trench, lay the cable and complete the connection. Typical customers might be construction sites in the middle of nowhere, teams fighting forest fires in the wilderness, or companies providing services at remote client sites for only a couple of weeks out of the year.

A third market, more prominent since 9/11, is emergency backup. In April 2003, a flood knocked out the land-line connection to a CSX Corp. switching yard in Tennessee. The railroad, which coincidentally had just entered into conversations with Tachyon, called for help. Tachyon delivered the goods and had the facility up and running within a day and a half. CSX Corp. has since purchased more than 100 of the Tachyon units as back-up at switching facilities around the country.

Dague also cites the instance of an Alcoa facility in the Midwest that lost its land-line service when a backhoe in a nearby construction project accidentally cut the cable. Fortunately, Alcoa had a Tachyon back-up system in place, which kicked in within a half second. The company didn’t even realize it had lost the land-line connection until someone at Tachyon told them, Dague boasts. The nice thing about satellites, he adds: “There are no backhoes in space.”

A survivor of the dot.com bust, Tachyon finally finds itself in fast-growth mode. Management's decision to move from San Diego, Calif., where the company was founded, to Northern Virginia last year was critical to managing the company’s accelerating growth. Northern Virginia is a larger telecom hub than Southern California. There’s a larger pool of telecom talent to draw from, more potential investors and more potential partners. As an example of the kind of opportunities that open up in Northern Virginia, Dague cites the negotiation of a strategic partnership with MCI, based in neighboring Loudoun County, in which Tachyon will provide the telecom giant a privately branded broadband-satellite solution.

Although Tachyon maintains its primary satellite gateway in San Diego, it also has built a backup gateway in Northern Virginia. “If an earthquake hits San Diego,” Dague says, “we’re not going to go down.”

With headlines fanning the fears of domestic terrorism, Tachyon is pushing the back-up angle hard. Government, surprisingly enough, is a hard sell, but businesses understand the value of business continuity. They regard Tachyon’s back-up units, which cost only $3,000 to set up and a couple hundred dollars a month to maintain, as insurance. Chemical manufacturers, power plants, nuclear generation facilities, missile silos… to Tachyon, they all look like potential customers.

Looking down the road, Dague sees new markets in developing satellite-based broadband services for mobile customers. “Picture a dish that follows a satellite as it moves. That’s coming. That will give you a T-1 on a train, or a plane, or a Humvee.” The U.S. Coast Guard relies upon Tachyon when its ships come in to dock in Norfolk. The next logical step is to extend the capability when the ships are at sea.

Tachyon also wants to expand the geographic scope of its coverage. Currently, the company leases satellite capacity that allows it to serve North America, Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. Eventually, management expects, the company will blanket the globe. The possibilities are boundless. But even with a customer roster of more than 300 and positive cash flow, Tachyon’s 70 employees can’t pursue every opportunity.

Senior management is keenly aware that success has killed a lot of fast-growth companies. One of Tachyon's great strengths is the loyalty of its customers. Maintaining the quality of its service is imperative. Says Dague: “We have a keen eye on that right now.”

-- August 11, 2004

Find Out More...

Tachyon Networks home page

Recent News

July 21, 2004

Tachyon Establishes Second Gateway in North America to Ensure Reliable Network Access For Its Customers

July 7, 2004

Tachyon Appoints Yaniv Oz Vice President of Distribution Channels

June 7, 2004

Tachyon Enables Army Parents Deployed in Iraq to View, Congratulate Graduating Sons and Daughters Real Time in Historic U.S. Army Remote Broadcast of Graduation Ceremonies

If you would like to sponsor a profile of your company on VA Newswire, contact the publisher at jim@vanewswire or by calling (804) 873-1543.