Bridge Data Becomes First Quote Vendor To Deliver Over Interactive Ku-Band Satellite

The financial quotations business has taken its first step into interactive satellite communications as a result of a new agreement between Bridge Holding Corp. and Telcom General Corp. The $4.9 million deal calls for Telcom General to provide 600 small earth stations for use by three market data services operating under the Bridge umbrella.

The Bridge satellite system will operate at Ku-band, a higher frequency than the C-band system used by Equatorial Communications Co., the nearly-ubiquitous satellite vendor in the quote business. Bridge will continue to use Equatorial, however, and is running a pilot test with Equatorial's new two-way technology.

"We are hedging our bet somewhat," says Buford Smith, president of Bridge's communications unit. "We have one foot in the C-band camp and one foot in the Ku-band camp." But, he says, "the scale of the project with Telcom General is considerably larger than the scale of the things that we're doing with Equatorial."

250 of the new four-foot earth stations will be receive-only and 350 will be interactive. Customers using the interactive dishes will receive data at a rate of 56 kilobits/second and transmit at 2400 bits/second. The system is already operational via GTE Spacenet's Gstar I spacecraft. Three services are being sent over the new link. Bridge Market Data, acquired by Bridge last year, is a 4800 bits/second broadcast feed of real-time futures prices. PC Quote, 30 per cent owned by Bridge (MTR, November 1985), is a 9600 bits/second broadcast feed of real-time stock, futures, and option prices. Bridge Data, the flagship, is an interactive service providing historical data and charting functions.

"At any particular subscriber location it's up to us to decide whether we're going to provide one or more broadcast channels and/or two-way services," says Smith. "Any site is potentially a two-way site." Bridge includes the cost of the satellite hardware in its customer pricing.

Smith cites three reasons for the Ku-band decision. First was the relative lack of licensing requirements for interactive earth stations. On April 9th, the FCC said it will issue blanket licenses for Ku-band networks, which means that licenses do not have to be granted on a site-by-site basis. The second reason was familiarity with Telcom General hardware through the Associated Press Satnet system, which Bridge uses and for which Telcom General is a major supplier. Third, he says, was flexibility -- "a much more custom system than I think we would have gotten from Equatorial."

Most of PC Quote's customers will continue to be serviced from the two-foot Equatorial dishes now in use, says Smith. Ku-band dishes will be given, however, to customers who need interactivity to access historical data, to small brokerage offices that require transaction processing.