The World Teleport Association (WTA) today announced that Hellas Sat has achieved provisional certification of its Space Center in Cyprus under WTA’s Teleport Certification Program. Since its introduction at IBC 2015, the Certification program has quickly grown in popularity. Starting with one certified facility in 2015, the program has added 40 in 3 years, and currently has 12 teleports engaged in the quality evaluation process. Certifications have been issued to teleports operated by USEI, AXESAT, STN, Eutelsat, du, COMSAT, Optus, Elara Comunicaciones, GlobalSat, Talia, Telenor, Telespazio, Vivacom, Cyta, Batelco, Singtel, CETel, Etisalat, Hawaii Pacific Teleport, Intelsat, Speedcast, Telstra Primacom, Santander Teleport and Arqiva. The industry has quickly adopted the transparent, independently verified standards as a means for teleports to differentiate themselves and for customers to choose the price-performance level suitable for their applications. To achieve Provisional Certification, a teleport operator completes a +170-item questionnaire and submits it to WTA. The Association analyzes the data based on standards established by its Certification Committee and issues the Provisional Certification based on the self-reported information. The teleport then has six months to achieve Full Certification. To achieve Full Certification under WTA’s program, an auditor is dispatched to visit the teleport, provide independent validation of the data submitted in the questionnaire, and identify additional factors that may positively or negatively affect the score. Full Certification is issued at a Tier number from 1 through 4, of which 4 represents the highest degree of excellence, and remains in effect for 3 years. “We are delighted to become part of this certification program of WTA,” said Christodoulos Protopapas, CEO of Hellas Sat. “Our main interest is to provide to our customers the highest level of services and support. We have made significant investments in recent years to develop our facilities, our DTH headend, antennae and network infrastructure, to ensure state-of-the-art managed services for our customers from our teleports in Cyprus and Greece. In our Greece and Cyprus premises, we host the primary and secondary Satellite Control Centres (SCCs), High-speed Satellite Internet Hubs, our Network Operation Centre (NOC) and, in Cyprus, the DTH TV headends. Both facilities are fully owned by Hellas Sat and offer both teleport and a wide range of managed services to our customers. Being located in Greece and Cyprus means we can offer teleport services to the Indian Ocean, European and Atlantic Ocean satellites, so this has slowly evolved into one of the major satellite telecom hubs in the region. The WTA certification program that we are now part of will provide additional recognition of our high quality of infrastructure, support and services we provide to our customers and to reinforce our commitment for further developments.” “Hellas Sat brings to 13 the number of WTA-certified teleports in Europe,” said executive director Robert Bell. “The strength of the program is in assuring customers that they will receive the price-performance that they expect, based on independent, standards-based evaluation.” WTA’s Teleport Certification Program serves both teleport operators and their customers by creating an objective, transparent, and internationally accepted method for teleport operators to document the quality of their operations for customers and strategic partners. It also provides a means for customers to select teleport vendors delivering the price-performance level that is appropriate for their applications. Click here for a list of certified teleports. [if !supportLineBreakNewLine] [endif]