MSS, High Throughput Satellite Markets Gearing Up for Future
Major mobile satellite services companies expect to expand end-user services over the next several years, said executives from Iridium, Orbcomm and other companies. The MSS companies are looking beyond service offerings and moving into delivering solutions, said Marc Eisenberg, Orbcomm CEO. “We're transitioning to solutions and solving end-to-end user issues,” he said Wednesday at the Satellite 2013 conference in Washington. “I think we're going to continue to move in that direction,” he said. “Whether we produce the solutions or the solutions are produced around you, [these] are two different ways of getting to the same thing,” said Matt Desch, Iridium CEO.
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It’s critically important for Globalstar to continue to drive into broader and broader markets for its “SPOT” and “SPOT” derivative handheld products, said Jay Monroe, Globalstar CEO. Globalstar plans to introduce the SPOT Gen 3 into the market, he said. “We're always looking to price them lower, to build them for less, to make them smaller … and make the batteries last a lot longer,” he said.
Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pearce said he expects government clients to be the early adopters of Global XPress, its Ka-band network launching this year. “I don’t see a massive migration of our L band customer base into Global Xpress,” he said. The network will initially attract mainly government customers, “who are amongst our heaviest and [most] sophisticated users,” he said. The company’s most heavy users will likely move off of L band to Ka band over the next decade, he said. “They'll release back a disproportionate amount of capacity into our network,” he said.
The end-to-end market is a fragmented market, said Desch. More devices are entering into the market each year, he said. It will continue to expand “as our technologies get cheaper and smaller and more capable and integrated, but it’s very fragmented,” he said. “We're trying to figure this market out.” Desch said he expects to see consolidation of middleware over the next 3-7 years. “As it gets bigger and more and more relevant, we're going to find ways that get easier and easier to integrate into those applications."
Monroe said he doesn’t expect the FCC to revisit how spectrum is assigned in the Big low earth orbit band as it reviews Globalstar’s request for a rulemaking that would allow it to use spectrum to provide terrestrial services. The band “is required by the nature of how we operate the channels in our network and we can’t compromise 3 MHz of those channels for anyone,” he said in reference to Iridium’s petition to have about 2.73 MHz reassigned. Iridium’s petition is “quite clear and straightforward and appropriate given the direction that Globalstar is moving [and given] the ability we have to utilize that spectrum for MSS purposes versus the direction that they're going,” Desch said.
High throughput satellites (HTS) can be used more heavily to benefit consumers and the satellite industry, satellite and telecom executives said during a later panel. Thaicom is looking forward to using HTS to advance mobility, said Nile Suwansiri, Thaicom marketing and business development vice president. “We believe that mobility plus HTS is a good combination for the future and has a lot of growth potential.” HTS also will benefit content delivery network systems, he said. The company completed a project where it distributed movies via satellite to small theaters in villages and small towns in Thailand, he said. The increase of bandwidth is true in some cases, but not in every case, said Pierre-Jean Beylier, SpeedCast CEO. “Some of our customers are asking for more bandwidth and HTS satellites in certain cases will be the answer."
IDirect is looking to put out better cellular backhaul and more services for government and the military as a result of HTS use, said Dave Bettinger, chief technology officer. Wideband Global Satcom satellites in use by the U.S. and Australian governments “have gone a long way to show that spot beam architectures are important,” he said. “More powerful satellites are going to drive more applications and use by special forces and other end users in the military.”