Most people start a business with the hope of making money, but Sanjay Singhal had a different idea.
The telecommunications company he started in September 2022, Sintel Satellite Services Inc., was not supposed to make a penny. That, Singhal said in a recent interview, is because the company is supposed to provide satellite-based communications to parts of the world that are without such communications, and therefore suffer from a kind of invisibility from the rest of the world.
Singhal, who says he is in his late 50s, was born in India, and holds several degrees in engineering, is talking about wiring up places in Africa, the Far East, Haiti, and parts of South and Central America.
As such, he is working with the International Telecommunication Union, a part of the United Nations that includes 193 member states as well as some 900 companies, universities and international and regional organizations. It is headed by a Secretary-General, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American diplomat who was born in Monmouth County, New Jersey. She is based in Geneva and could not be reached for comment.
The ITU, according to its website, works with companies in the automotive, healthcare, industrial and utility sectors.
Singhal is the owner of Sintel Satellite Services Inc., in Plainview, a company that designs and develops satellite communications systems, Earth stations, and networks.He came to the United States in 1985 and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering with specialization in microwaves from the State University of New York at Stony Brook., in 1987. He had previously earned an electrical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. He also holds a degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Soon after graduating from Stony Brook, Singhal began working for Globecomm Systems Inc. in Hauppauge, one of Long Island’s largest remote communications satellite companies. He traveled extensively for Globecomm, and after a time, worked for the company as a consultant.
Singhal began his own company, in Plainview, in 2004.
But something, he thought, was missing in his life.
“I saw conditions in some of these countries, where people had little or no communications,” Singhal said.”A lot of these places had a lot of unrest.”
Singhal said that, by his estimate, some 2.6 billion people on Earth are without communications systems. That, he said, represents about 35 % of the world’s population.
“It was my dream to provide them with communications,” Singhal said. “I would like to make communication a human right, just like there is a need for clean water and food. They should have some sort of connectivity.”
So far, Singhal said, his work is in the proposal stages with the International Telecommunication Union. But he hopes to begin work soon on establishing communications systems in some of these countries and expand the work further after that.
Meanwhile,his Sintel Satellite Services company continues to operate in Plainview. He makes use of consultants, he said, in more than 30 countries around the world, including some of the most troubled, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
His travels around the world, he said, convinced him that he had to “give back” to poorer countries where communications are so sorely lacking.
“I thought, why not do it on a nonprofit basis,” Singhal said. “There are so many advantages to these countries.”
“I don’t make any money,” he said. “This is my way of giving back for all of the years I have spent as a professional.”
He has even proposed advanced satellite systems for war-torn Ukraine, although that may have to wait until the fighting ceases.
Singhal said he has pledged to work with the ITU to work on communications systems in South Sudan, Libya, parts of India and parts of Asia.
“This is free work,” he said. “It helps the worldwide community.”
Peter Goldsmith, chairman of LISTnet, Long Island’s largest promoter of technology companies, has become close friends with Singhal.
“A lot of powerful organizations want to join him in doing this,” Goldsmith said, “He is very sincere. He can’t do it all by himself, of course. But I believe in him.”
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