Inmarsat working to recover from satellite outage

Inmarsat said it is working to restore services provided by its I-4 F1 satellite in East Asia and the Pacific, after an outage that impacted maritime communications and agricultural operations, among others.

In a brief advisory, the operator said the outage occurred at 21.14 UTC on Sunday April 16 - which translates to 7.14am Monday Sydney time.

“This resulted in the temporary loss of services from the satellite and the company immediately instigated its recovery procedures,” it said.

The availability of “safety services” - which enable offshore maritime communications, for example - was guaranteed by shifting the workload temporarily to a “contingency satellite”.

Inmarsat then turned its attention to “Classic Aero recovery”; Classic Aero is a satellite-based communications system used inflight by pilots.

Inmarsat said its recovery “will be followed by the transfer of Inmarsat-C services from the contingency satellite back to I-4 F1, and then a focus on the restoration of other services.”

Those “other services” were put in the spotlight yesterday with both ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald reporting that the outage had impacted GPS-based agricultural equipment, halting the planting of winter crops.

Farmers use GPS-based equipment to increase accuracy when planting crops, optimising the available land while minimising wastage of seeds and fertiliser.