Working with partners in Colombia, Miami-Dade-based NewCom International is setting up satellite systems that link schools, hospitals, government offices and emergency services at about 600 rural locations in the South American nation with Internet providers in the United States.

NewCom engineers also have installed systems in 20 rural medical facilities in Colombia that provide Internet access and teleconferencing connections with hospitals in the United States. In Africa, NewCom is helping telecommunications companies in Gambia and Guinea provide Internet access and Internet telephone service to their customers.

A small, highly specialized company, NewCom designs and develops satellite and telecommunications projects and sells equipment and services to government and private-sector clients in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the United States.

MORE THAN PRODUCTS

NewCom has successfully developed a niche market by offering a full range of telecom services that larger companies sometimes can't match -- or aren't interested in pursuing. ''We don't just sell equipment; we provide turn-key solutions in telecommunications so customers don't have to call five different vendors,'' said Jaime Dickinson, NewCom's chief operating officer and one of the members of the family that owns the firm.

"We appeal to customers because we provide better service than the big satellite companies. Our national operations center [in Miami-Dade] is staffed 24/7 to ensure that our customers obtain continuous service wherever they are."

While NewCom was started in 2004, some of the firm's employees have been working in telecommunications with the Dickinson family for much longer.

The family set up three telecommunications companies in the early 1990s and sold them to American Tower, which owns wireless communications towers, in the late 1990s. They joined the new parent company's Verestar telecommunications division.

But when Verestar declared bankruptcy, Jaime and his brother, Sheridan, decided to create NewCom with some of their former employees.

As an added bonus, NewCom also attracted some of the customers the family firm had worked with in the 1990s. "Some of our clients started with us over 15 years ago," Dickinson said. "They knew us from our former companies, and they came back."

NewCom also picked up new customers quickly because larger companies weren't interested in offering the full range of project planning, equipment, training and service, Dickinson said.

Big satellite companies, for example, were often more interested in selling transmission capacity than planning and managing projects. And some equipment manufacturers just wanted to sell satellite dishes, modems, routers and other sophisticated items.

VARIETY OF CUSTOMERS

Today, NewCom has about 100 customers, including government agencies, banks, oil companies with offshore operations, cattlemen, video companies and firms that offer prepaid international phone cards. The company owns a teleport in northwest Miami-Dade County with 20 satellite dishes and operates other teleports in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

NewCom owns most of the satellite antennas at its South Florida site but leases space to other telecommunications companies that need to locate a satellite dish in South Florida. The antennas at NewCom's teleport can transmit and receive signals from commercial satellites that cover a large swath of southern Florida, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and parts of South America.

In addition to its own teleport, NewCom uses fiber optic cable and links to other commercial satellites to expand its footprint to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the Western Hemisphere.

The company also leases space in its operations center to other telecommunications firms that use NewCom's systems. Two other sources of business are providing disaster recovery service and backup systems.

RAPID GROWTH

NewCom has grown quickly in the past five years, and in 2008 saw revenue grow by 40 percent. Despite the world recession and competition from other satellite providers, Dickinson says he expects another 40 percent increase this year. "Demand in our sector is very strong," he said.

Good service is key to their relationship with NewCom, according to customers.

"We work with several satellite providers, and we found that NewCom is flexible in meeting our needs," said Miguel Quevedo, vice president of operations for Business Telecommunications Services in Miami. The company provides international phone service linked to prepaid cards and other telecom services.

FrontGate Networks, an Orlando company that offers Internet, video and voice services to residential customers in South Florida, has been working with NewCom since it was founded.

"We locate our dishes at NewCom's teleport and we house our equipment at their operations center," said David Suarez, FrontGate's chief operating officer. "They're very professional. We had a lot of options, but we liked their pricing, their business culture, but overall, their ability to stand behind what they offer. When we have an issue, it's very nice to see how they react with a sense of urgency."