India has used INSATs to expand television and telecommunication services, track cyclones, introduce education via satellite and provide mobile satellite services for companies and people.
But INSAT 3-B is exclusively a telecommunication satellite.
With transponders on INSAT 3-B supporting very small aperture terminal (VSAT) communications, the satellite will allow businesses in India to expand private communication networks, an alternative to India's notoriously unreliable terrestrial telephone links.
The satellite also will mark the ISRO's debut into tele-medicine.
"Transponders will be reserved to set up voice, video and data links between top city hospitals and healthcare clinics in remote villages," Dr. Ramamurthy Ramani, deputy director of satellite communications at ISRO headquarters in Bangalore, told SPACE.com. "Scanned images could be sent to servers in super-specialty hospitals from the remote sites using intranet technology through 64-kilobyte-per-second VSAT data links," Dr Ramani said.
More than 70 percent of India's 450,000 doctors work in cities, and hospitals face a deluge of patients who travel hundreds of miles in search of specialists.
"General practitioners or, in some cases, even nursing staff in remote health clinics could discuss treatment options for their patients with specialists in cities," said a consultant doctor at a top corporate hospital that has proposed to set up a tele-medicine center in a southern Indian village.
"Transponders will be reserved to set up voice, video and data links between top city hospitals and health-care clinics in remote villages."
A non-government organization has also asked ISRO to help introduce tele-medicine services to tribes in forested hills near Mysore in southern India.
ISRO officials say another developmental impact of INSAT 3-B will be in creating denser distance education networks. Already, primary school teachers, healthcare technicians and local government workers receive lessons beamed via satellite from several state capitals.
The existing infrastructure allows analog technology supporting one-way video transmission. The classrooms can only use telephone lines for two-way consultations with teachers.
"With INSAT 3-B, these systems will be upgraded to digital technology allowing classrooms to download text and lessons from servers at teaching ends," Dr. Ramani said. "The convergence of computers and digital-TV transmission will also mean more interactivity between teachers and students," he said.
Distance education technology is primarily used at present by state governments for training staff and some states have pledged to raise the number of teaching centers from 30 to 100. ISRO also expects software and management education institutions to use INSAT 3-B to reach out to more students.
But the fastest and most eager users of INSAT 3-B may be Indian business institutions keen on setting up private communications networks that link offices across the country.
India's VSAT expansion plans were set back with the failure of INSAT 2-D satellite a few months after launch in 1997. The launch of INSAT 3-B was advanced ahead of INSAT 3-A to make up for the loss of INSAT 2-D.
At present, India has some 9,000 VSATs serving some 350 businesses. Industries, banks, financial institutions and the stock exchange make up 70 percent of VSAT users relying on seven transponders aboard two earlier satellites -- INSAT 2-B and INSAT 2-C.
"INSAT 3-B will double the transponder capacity," Dr. Ramani said. "New users could come in and existing users could get more bandwidth."
With its payload of 12 extended C-band transponders, a mobile satellite service transponder and three Ku-band channels, INSAT 3-B has a design life of 10 years. After its injection into an elliptical orbit by an Ariane 5 launcher, engineers at the Master Control Facility in southern India will begin a series of motor firings to steer the satellite into its final parking slot 22,300 (35,887 kilometers) above the equator, 83 degrees east longitude.
ISRO is building three more INSAT 3 satellites to be launched between now and 2002; and has earmarked at least $450 million for the INSAT 3 program.
India does not have the capability yet to launch its own INSAT-class satellites, but plans to test its geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle later this year.
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