Satellite Networks for Banking

Thailands Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives

Thailands Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) needed to enhance and expand services and solutions offered to farmers and farming institutions. BAAC uses Gilats SkyEdge to provide voice and data networking between branches, meeting strict requirements for security, short latency, quality of service and cost. With SkyEdges speed, flexibility, stability and security, BAAC is confident they can not only improve existing services, but expand to meet growing customer needs.
The Business The government of Thailand established the BAAC as a State enterprise overseen by the Ministry of Finance. The BAAC's mission is to more widely extend credit directly to individual farmers as well as through farmer institutions. BAAC aims not just to reach financial objectives, but to also improve the quality of life of farmers. It provides financial assistance to promote agriculture as an occupation for farmers and farmer institutions, and to help farmers and farmer institutions increase their productivity and income. In addition, BAAC provides rural areas with standard banking services such as credit, checking and savings. Part of BAACs IT strategy is to develop e-banking solutions, and that requires that all branches have modern communications networks between each branch and other branches, provincial offices and other institutions The Challenge BAAC needed a reliable platform to enable efficient transmission of bandwidth intensive information to a large number of remote branches. The network needs to improve existing customer service offerings such as Customer Information Facilities (CIF), retail loans, deposits and branch automation, and support new business channels such as credit and debit cards and online banking. BAAC also wanted the ability for easy future expansion into advanced applications such as video conferencing and mobile banking solutions. BAAC already had an existing but outdated VSAT solution, but it could not provide broadband speed for advanced banking services. It was also relatively inefficient and expensive.

C A S E S T U D Y

of Gilats Deployment will allow us VSAT network to assure our customers that they will receive the highest level of service on a continual basis especially in remote areas where no banking service was available.

Thiraphong Tangthirasunan, BAAC President

SkyEdge met BAACs critical needs, providing: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) Secure private network. Short latency through advanced access schemes. Efficient space segment usage. Advanced QoS for both inbound and outbound services. High quality telephony communications. Low Total Cost of Ownership, especially low operating expenses.

Satellite Networks for Banking

BAAC had a set of requirements that needed to be satisfied. First, security is always a primary concern for every financial institution. Second, satellite latency must be minimized. Third, the first two criteria must not reduce space segment efficiency. Fourth, advanced Quality of Service (QoS) methods must prioritize application data traffic, ensuring that online banking transactions and real-time traffic such as voice or video services get a higher priority than processes such as database updates and file transfers. Fifth, tollgrade voice services between branches is necessary to improve customer service. Finally, while up-front costs were important, over the entire duration of the project it was critical to minimize outbound carrier bandwidth. The Solution After considering several communication solutions, BAAC found that no single terrestrial technology could provide the reliability and bandwidth in a costeffective manner. While some of the banks offices were in urban areas, remote areas, where no terrestrial communication solution was practical, required a satellite solution for the prime communication link. The bank decided to deploy a hybrid solution mixing terrestrial and satellite network links. Following a detailed market survey, Gilats service offering was found to be the best available platform for BAACs needs. Gilat's SkyEdge network enables BAAC to operate all applications for both data and voice on one platform, benefit from the reliability of satellite technology and provide for future expansion. In addition, SkyEdges efficiencies meant that the operating expenses of the network would be minimized, therefore improving ROI. Other technical solutions directly addressed BAACs needs. Data security is important to any business, but it is absolutely critical to financial institutions. SkyEdge supports encryption for both inbound and outbound traffic, as well as end-to-end IPSec solutions. While encryption has a risk of expanding data and thus transmission latency, SkyEdge minimizes latency through TCP Acceleration and other methods to enhance space-segment efficiency. Another major cost savings is that SkyEdge supports outbound carrier rates as low as 256 ksps and fine granularity in bandwidth increases, helping BAAC hold down initial costs and then carefully grow their networks while controlling expenditures. Summary BAAC is now able to significantly enhance its financial services to the agricultural community in Thailand. They are able to do so while holding down infrastructure costs and speeding up service rollout. Gilats SkyEdge is instrumental in helping BAAC meet and exceed the demands of Thailands Ministry of Finance, helping continue Thailands economic growth and prosperity. BAAC plans to add more advanced services in the future, such as mobile and e-banking, and that will require a scalable network. With SkyEdge, BAAC can also be confident that those future needs will be served.

Typical BAAC Remote Site

Thaicom 2C C-Band

4.6m Antenna

2.4m Antenna
VSAT Indoor Unit

HUB

SkyEdge Pro

E1 MFC-R2

IP LAN

PABX

IP Based Servers

IP based clients & Applications

Phone / Fax

Gilat HQ +972 3 925 2000 www.gilat.com

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