Staying Connected While Digging Up Dinosaurs

Monday, March 1, 2004

Staying Connected While Digging Up Dinosaurs (NAPSA)—Even dinosaurs can get high-speed Internet access— just ask Dr. Art Chadwick of Southwestern Adventist University (SWAU). For the last eight years, he has spent a month of his summer completely disconnected from most friends and family. No phone, no Internet, no fax, no cell phone access. More than 20 miles away from the nearest paved road in eastern Wyoming, Chadwick and his committed staff isolate themselves at one of the world’s largest dinosaur excavation sites in the world. This year, however, the “Dino Dig Project” got creative and tapped into satellite broadband to take the quarry from isolation to being connected to the outside world. “We weretired of feeling so disconnected,” explains Chadwick. “But just to get a phone line installed would have cost more than $3,000, not to mention that dial-up access is slow and cumbersome. Our technical staff started looking into other solutions and discovered that satellite broadband was a fraction of the cost and would enable a number of people to be connected at once.” The 30 people that stayed at the campsite and quarry throughout the month were able to access email and the Internet via the DirEcway broadbandsatellite service and could update the “dino dig’s” Web site in real time. The technical crew installed a wireless router enabling Wi-Fi connectivity and the crew often found themselves sitting outside, e-mailing family and uploading pictures to the Web journal. “We were hundreds of miles away from major business centers, X Sag | 2 y d| Dic FOR DINOSAURS THEY MUST—But thanks to high-speed Internet service, they weren’t alone. yet we were able to set up a business-class solution,” says Justin Woods, the project’s technical coordinator. “We had a live Web-cam on site streaming to our Website, high-speed Internet access with downlink speeds up to 1 Mbps, and even Wi-Fi connectivity.” For decades, satellite has provided communications for global Fortune 500 companies including the likes of Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Wendy’s and Ford. The same technology that provides thereliability and scalability needed by the world’s largest companies is also available to SWAU’s excavation site in eastern Wyoming, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and consumersacross the U.S. “What makes satellite Internet access uniqueis that the service is the same regardless of whether you're in eastern Wyoming or the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Like satellite TV, all you need is a view of the southern sky,” explains David Shiff, vice president of Hughes Network Systems, the world’s leading provider of satellite broadband products and services, which it markets under the DIRECWAY name. To learn more, visit www.dwayforbiz.com.

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