"With five major rivers near key agricultural areas, China loses some $3.5 billion every year due to damage caused by flooding; it has a huge impact on the economy here," said Andy Lovit, SkyStream's vice president of worldwide field operations.

"Our equipment allows the Ministry of Water Resources to target its own field bureaus and other military outposts in flooded or flood-prone areas with the latest information, including dynamic maps, river water tables, weather and imagery. We're proud to provide a critical part of China's state-of-the-art emergency preparedness and response system."

The real-time flood information zBand delivers allows the Ministry of Water Resources to take immediate action and institute command and control from its headquarters via a central satellite uplink in Beijing, and broadcast down to its bureaus across the country.

Based on the information zBand provides, the Ministry might order local officials to open levees to drain water into the flatland, or deploy the appropriate military personnel for disaster intervention in time to save lives, protect crop harvests and prevent damage.

The Ministry currently has deployed 300 satellite receiver stations at Ministry of Water Resource bureaus along its rivers, and plans to rollout an additional 4,000 "edge" locations as part of its growing nationwide network.

In an official letter to SkyStream, the Ministry of Water Resources stated, "after one year of using this technology, we believe our flood control program is among the most advanced in the world. We needed a content delivery solution that was proven, absolutely reliable, allows targeted distribution of information and is scalable as our network grows, so we selected zBand for our program's network expansion."

SkyStream's zBand client-server software operates at the satellite uplink and downlink sites to manage, control and target the delivery of information across the Ministry's network.

With all of its major cities near rivers, each bureau or flood control station needs information on a unique schedule. Stations also need targeted, real-time information in the event of an impending emergency, such as rising waters upriver from the station.

The ministry's satellite uplink uses multiple pairs of SkyStream SMRs to send outbound content -- flood control reports, weather and imagery of current conditions -- to the local bureaus, where a SkyStream EMR receives the content. The local ministry bureaus use local LAN access to the Internet to file monitoring reports back to the ministry for organization and analysis.

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