To date, the company has established remote public telephone services and point-to-point service with a comprehensive management system provided by the RADview SNMP central management platform. "The remote management feature is essential for Petrobras," said Washington Pimenta, an adviser to the Petrobras engineering division. "Technicians do not have to come from the mainland to service equipment that is located in the middle of the ocean."

Petrobras has plans to build on the success of their seaborne phone booths. As their ATM backbone expands, future applications may include video transmission as well as compressed voice services in order to save bandwidth. These are among the possibilities that are currently being studied.

"Megaplex-2100 is an essential element in this effort," Pimenta said. "For example, we are interested in expanding our internal network in locations on the mainland where the company is still using leased lines for data and voice traffic."