The handheld satellite phone business will continue to slide due to more terrestrial connectivity, alternatives and more versatile devices, with revenue dropping from $405 million annually today to $357 million by 2027, Northern Sky Research analyst Alan Crisp blogged Wednesday. The industry can still have a future by integrating with terrestrial networks and more retail-focused business models, he said.
Satellite-TV providers are primed to have the biggest losses from cord cutting, S&P Global Ratings reported. Cable TV companies are projected to lose nearly 2 percent of subscribers in 2019, but overall losses will be cushioned by revenue from broadband service accounts, it said last week. Satellite providers “are particularly vulnerable without the option of internet,” and satellite subscriptions are forecast to slide 6 percent this year, while Dish Network subscriptions could fall as much as 9 percent. Dish didn’t comment. The largest cable companies “are likely to be able to hold their own,” said S&P, but telecom and midsized cable companies will have varying degrees of loss or gain “as consumers disengage from cable.”
OneWeb's ultimate goal is 1,980 broadband satellites, though such plans "are always subject to change!," CEO Greg Wyler tweeted Wednesday. He said those 1,980 -- 55 satellites for each of 36 orbital planes -- are the limit of what the company can do "because whatever we build must respect (not interfere) with prior filed satellites." He said phase one is at least 600 satellites needed for global coverage and "enough profitability to self-fund growth," and as many as 900, while the second-generation designs are finalized and OneWeb builds its tooling and manufacturing lines. Those second-generation satellites "will have at least 50x more throughput than Gen1" and get the company up to its planned 1,980, he said. The process will take "(at least) a few years!," he said.
Satellite broadband company Astranis Space Technologies signed Alaskan connectivity company Pacific Dataport as an inaugural customer for Astranis' first commercial satellite, with the intention of bandwidth availability in Alaska and lowered pricing of internet access, they said Wednesday. Astranis will build, launch and operate the high-throughput microsatellite, which will operate in geostationary orbit. Launch is expected in 2020, providing 7.5 Gbps of capacity -- roughly tripling current available satellite capacity there.
The federal government has been reminding GPS users about April's rollover event for close to a year, and the event will show "who has been paying attention," blogged the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation Monday. The Department of Homeland Security says legacy GPS navigation messages have a 10-bit parameter that "rolls over" to zero every 1,024 weeks, starting in January 1980, with the next scheduled for the week of April 6. It said that rollover could affect the reliability of coordinated universal time signals received by some critical infrastructure owners and operators.
If there are to be new export controls on position, navigation and timing technology, they should come after detailed talks between the government and commercial enterprises doing R&D, manufacture and distribution of PNT technologies, the GPS Innovation Alliance commented last week in a Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security proceeding on identifying and proposing controls on emerging technologies essential to national security. Those talks need to cover such ground as the extent to which emerging PNT technologies might become public information, the extent to which the PNT industry is doing R&D activities outside the U.S. and whether foreign firms might have developed PNT technologies to the point U.S. export controls would be ineffectual, GPSIA said.
The final 10 satellites of Iridium's Next broadband satellite constellation were launched into orbit Friday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the company said. It said 75 of the 81 Next satellites being built have been launched, with nine of those to be in-orbit spares, and the remaining six unlaunched satellites to be ground spares. Aireon said having 75 of its hosted payloads in orbit on the Next satellites was one of the last remaining hurdles before it begins its satellite-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast aircraft surveillance service within weeks.
After a disappointing 2018 for commercial satellite communication -- no revenue rebound, pricing and backlog declines and many operators seeing video revenue declines -- stronger revenue is a chief concern for most operators this year, Northern Sky Research analyst Gagan Agrawal blogged Wednesday. Service providers enjoyed "a marquee year," especially with bigger inroads into aerospace, consumer broadband, nautical and backhaul markets. He said strong market forecasts in broadband, aero and maritime point to service providers likely doubling revenue over the next four to five years. This year also should see capacity pricing declines similar to 2018, he said.
SpaceX canceled Thursday's launch of a GPS satellite due to weather conditions, it said. The GPS III-SV01 spacecraft launch was rescheduled for Saturday.
SiriusXM asked FCC staff to OK the company's emergency alert system request (see 1811070047). The company says not all the satellite-radio provider's channels can carry such alerts "in a way that would trigger a downstream broadcaster’s own EAS alert," and EAS participants could monitor only the two SiriusXM free preview channels. It said the record appears complete after the Federal Emergency Management Agency OK'd (see page 3) use of SiriusXM satellites as alternative EAS monitoring sources for only those two channels, Sirius network Channel 184 and XM Radio network Channel 1, and the commission's comment cycle ended. A lawyer for the company reported in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 15-94 that he and others met Public Safety Bureau Deputy Chief Nicole McGinnis and Policy and Licensing Division Deputy Chief Greg Cooke.