Satellite Industry Addresses Consumer Bandwidth Demand With High Throughput Satellite Capacity

Demand for consumer bandwidth will continue to drive the development and innovation of high-throughput satellites, executives said Tuesday at a Global VSAT Forum event in Washington. High-throughput satellites offer new opportunities for space innovation, said Bruno Fromont, Intelsat corporate strategy vice president. “If we don’t change how we design the space segment, we cannot unlock even more efficiency in the future.” One recent trend is the way that high-throughput satellites are capturing big data, which is driven by a greater demand for bandwidth, he said. With the amount of Internet Protocol traffic growing, “this presents a tremendous amount of data to process, and we can’t stay behind if we want the satellite industry to become relevant in the context of the larger telecommunication industry,” he said.

O3b Networks uses high-throughput satellites to target consumers living in rural or suburban areas that don’t have access to fiber, cable or high-speed DSL, said Ashok Rao, product development vice president. “We are the middle mile and we are positioned as an alternative to fiber.” O3b will launch four satellites this month and four more in September, he said. The company uses cheap, basic satellites, he said. There’s no complication or on-board processing and four satellites can be launched on one vehicle, he said. When the industry overall starts launching multiple satellites on one rocket, “we can bring cost down,” Rao added.

The spectrum crunch will create a “fierce battle” in the geostationary arc, said Intelsat’s Fromont. The industry will need a model where terrestrial and satellite capabilities can co-exist, he said. To carry bits, “we need more spectrum everywhere,” he said. “It’s about grabbing everything that’s available to provide bits to consumers and for the different applications we want to serve.” The industry has used its Ka-band high-throughput capacity to create alternatives to terrestrial communication, said Vern Fotheringham, Kymeta CEO. “But we are still, with all our capacity, tremendously capacity-limited,” he said. “We've almost completely ignored the fact that there’s no broadcast component extension to the global Internet. … What technology is cheaper than satellite for one to many?"

While the Ka-band technology that has developed wasn’t possible without consumer demand, the enterprise market remains significant, said Aditya Chatterjee, Spacenet chief technology officer. “Enterprise also plays a big role in improving the technology as well in terms of SLAs [service level agreements] and in terms of hybrid technology.” The true measure of satellite’s evolution is that “it’s now in the telecom mainstream as a service,” Hughes’s Slekys said. It’s all about satellite operators “who are delivering services as a retailer into the marketplace,” he said. “You don’t have everybody in the food chain eating up the margin in a way that, at the end, to the customer, it’s either too expensive or too limited a marketplace."

Inmarsat’s upcoming Global Xpress Ka-band network will add significant Ka band to the GEO belt “enabling seamless mobile operations,” said Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, policy senior vice president at Inmarsat. The advantages of high-throughput satellites operating in Ka band include smaller spot beams, higher throughput and more frequency reuse, she said. It’s a global operation that’s expected to support maritime operations, business aviation and in-flight entertainment, she said. Today there are more Ka-band satellites coming down the pipeline, Cowen-Hirsch said. “We want to ensure that we continue our own operation and not interfere with others."

National and international regulation hasn’t kept pace with technology development, said Carlos Nalda, a telecom attorney at Squire Sanders, which represents GVF. There has been work and development in Ka-band and Ku-band platforms, he said. However, “individual country regulators have not adopted local rules and requirements governing these types of services,” he said. In an international regulatory environment, aeronautical and maritime services raise the most fundamental questions, he said. There may be regulations applicable to Ku band that are under development in the Ka band, but they haven’t been fully accepted regionally or nationally, he said. FCC actions to establish allocation status for earth stations on vessels, vehicle-mounted earth stations and earth stations aboard aircraft (ESAA)are important steps, Nalda added. “The recent adopting of ESAA rules show that the FCC can work to license systems and allow them to operate commercially and successfully.”