SouthPAN early Open Services coverage area. Courtesy Geoscience Australia.
Following an outage that began on Monday, 20 April, after a failure of the Inmarsat I-4 F1 satellite, SouthPAN services have now been restored.
Geoscience Australia (GA) — the lead Australian agency for the SouthPAN program — announced the service restoration just after 10:00am on Friday, 21 April.
“SouthPAN services in Australia and New Zealand are back online and available to users, as the service outage affecting SouthPAN users via Inmarsat I-4F1 Satellite has now been rectified,” GA said in an emailed statement.
Inmarsat had earlier (19 April, UK time) issued a statement saying that the majority of its I-4 F1 services had been restored.
“Inmarsat has recovered the I-4 F1 satellite, which suffered a partial loss of power. That loss of power invoked automatic procedures on the satellite that led to the suspension of services. Work continues to optimise performance and address some specific residual issues,” the company said.
Inmarsat said that it “regrets the outage and apologises to all impacted users” and outlined the status of various services provided by the I-4 F1 satellite:
- “All safety services have now been restored. Classic Aero services were successfully restored yesterday (18 Apr). Maritime safety services, which had been transferred to contingency satellites in line with the IMSO approved operational process, were transferred back to I-4 F1 yesterday (18 Apr) following reactivation of Inmarsat C.
- Inmarsat’s Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) services, including SwiftBroadband and SwiftBroadband-Safety, FleetBroadband and BGAN, are now restored and being optimised.
- Most leases have now been restored, with remaining ones a priority and expected shortly.
- GSPS (satellite phone) services are still being addressed.”
As Spatial Source reported earlier, the SouthPAN outage had affected users across Australia and New Zealand, including those involved in agriculture.
