Dish/EchoStar Seen Opening Door to In-Flight, Maritime Connectivity Options
Dish Network's planned buy of EchoStar (see 2308080009) could point to New Dish trying to gain traction in the in-flight/maritime connectivity market, we were told. Industry followers see a variety of potential aero/maritime options.
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Since the Airline Passenger Experience Association announced last week that Dish had joined, "I think it's reasonable to assume they will explore options," emailed David Whelan, Valour Consultancy senior analyst. Whelan said DirecTV seemingly has a stronger presence than Dish in the in-flight entertainment and connectivity (IFEC) market, but the purchase "could help reinvigorate" Dish's Live TV offering in the airline market.
One potential New Dish option would be mirroring Inmarsat's work with the European Aviation Network and using New Dish S-band spectrum for an air-to-ground connectivity layer augment, said Northern Sky Research analyst Brad Grady. The EAN, done in partnership with Deutsche Telekom, combines satellite coverage and a terrestrial 4G LTE network to provide in-flight connectivity over Europe. However, an EAN-like approach might not be the best use of the S band since it also could be employed in direct-to-device service, Grady said. He said New Dish also might be interested in combining Hughes broadband with Dish's content delivery into a bundled IFEC offering.
Satellite operators increasingly are trying to capture more of the value chain by offering services, not just connectivity, Grady said, citing Viasat's buy of Inmarsat as an attempt to get a bigger footprint in the services delivery end of the network. Dish might be thinking about EchoStar as a way of getting more at the end of the network in aero/nautical, but it would still need more pieces to actually touch the ship or plane, he said.
EchoStar's Hughes and OneWeb announced earlier this summer they're partnering on the in-flight connectivity market using OneWeb's low earth orbit satellite constellation and Hughes' flat-panel antennas.
Asked about in-flight and maritime connectivity post merger, an EchoStar spokesperson emailed that the merger announcement has no impact on the company's aero/maritime strategy. "Until the close of the merger, which is expected by the end of the year, it’s business as usual for us," she said. Dish didn't comment.
One possible emerging competitive challenge in the maritime market could be Intelsat, armed with the nearly $3.7 billion it expects to receive by year's end for completing the C-band accelerated clearing (see 2308140051), Grady said. Some of that money could fund its strategy of going further down the value chain, such as through an Intelsat buy of a maritime service provider, he said.
Aero/maritime didn't come up when Dish and EchoStar executives discussed the deal in a call with analysts last week. EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan called private 5G networks, leveraging Dish's spectrum assets and EchoStar's software-defined wide area network management expertise, "a big opportunity for us." He said the focus for those would be on enterprise and government customers. NSR's Grady said such private 5G networks are an "underappreciated technology service" in which New Dish could be well positioned.