ABS CEO Tom Choi has garnered a reputation for speaking unabashedly \u2014 so his somewhat harsh comments on the viability of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations came as no surprise during the SATELLITE 2017 Exhibition & Conference. During the conference\u2019s final panel, \u201cVisions of the Future Satellite Industry: Business Beyond SATELLITE 2017,\u201d Choi reiterated his doubts about the goals some companies in the satellite industry are pushing to achieve.<\/p>\n
According to Choi, companies rushing to build bigger High-Throughput Satellites (HTS) and launch mega-constellations into LEO are suffering from a \u201cherd mentality \u2026 without really understanding how this capacity is going to get sold or where the customers are going to come from.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI always try to think about the number one thing: the customer. Who is the customer, how am I going to serve that customer, what technologies do I use to solve a customer problem? I just don\u2019t understand why some of the networks are being designed the way they are,\u201d Choi said, calling out OneWeb specifically as he had in previous panels that week. \u201cYou\u2019ve heard me being vocally critical of OneWeb. If I was building a system to serve people, I would put maximum capacity over where those people are.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Choi believes all satellite operators have the same end-goal of bridging the \u201cdigital divide,\u201d he thinks solving the issue will require innovation that extends beyond just providing global capacity, due to the different connectivity needs of different markets. One major hurdle, he says, is bringing down the cost of ground infrastructure.<\/p>\n
As vice president of business development for iDirect, David Harrower is intimately aware of the limitations of ground networks, and agreed with Choi\u2019s point. \u201cWhat a lot of operators don\u2019t anticipate is the ground network required. It\u2019s a cost impact that is challenging for a lot of satellite operators,\u201d he said. In order to make progress in the industry, Harrower thinks executives need to focus on improving the availability of low-cost terminals, as well as pushing for adoption of emerging technology such as Flat Panel Antennas (FPAs).<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the technology on the ground side simply isn\u2019t evolving fast enough for the satellite industry to steal market share from terrestrial wireless competition, says Andrey Kirillovich, director for integration services and turnkey projects at Russian Satellite Communications Company (RSCC). \u201cThe ground segment is developing behind the development of the space segment. The main problem is the readiness of FPAs,\u201d he said. FPAs such as Kymeta\u2019s mTenna product line are only just now becoming commercially available, and the panelists agreed that such products will be key to the industry\u2019s future growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we have to look at antennas not as a commodity but as an enablement aspect,\u201d said Harrower. \u201c[They have] to be cheap, easy to install, and readily accessible. We would anticipate in the next two to three years you\u2019re going to see terminals in the $100 range in the consumer market. The costs have to be there to enable machine-to-machine, Internet of Things (IoT), [and] connected cars.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, Choi expressed doubt, arguing that providing connectivity via Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) will almost always be more profitable. \u201cThese phased array terminals are not going to go down to $20 or $30. I could go to a factory in Taiwan today and buy a VSAT antenna for operating in Ka-band for $60. That\u2019s extremely affordable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Consequently, according to Choi, ABS will continue to pursue GEO solutions to provide capacity to rural areas. \u201cOur plans are to selectively target specific countries from GEO where we can bring a lot of capacity on a low cost basis,\u201d he said. He highlighted Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as areas where ABS plans to target. \u201cTheir access to infrastructure is very low and we believe that\u2019s where a low cost GEO service for residential broadband would be the most attractive. The DRC alone is probably almost 80 million people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the Centre National d\u2019Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, had one warning for companies solely interested in LEO: watch out for orbital debris. Because smaller satellites are more difficult to track and many lack deorbiting capabilities outside of atmospheric drag, Le Gall said the onus is on these companies to ensure their mega-constellations do not become space junk at the end of their lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cGovernments that allow these systems to launch better take responsibility if these things break or the LEO arc is going to become a death zone,\u201d Choi added.<\/p>\n
As for the industry beyond the eternal LEO versus GEO debate, Vern Smith, vice president of communication satellites and new ventures at Lockheed Martin, said he believes the next big wave of innovation will emerge on the production side. He pointed out that historically, satellite manufacturers have built satellites custom to order depending on the client\u2019s specific needs. In the future, he expects to see more standardization as manufacturers \u201cproductize things across multiple solutions,\u201d using \u201ccommon bus platforms across four or five solutions,\u201d he said. In turn, this will significantly shorten the manufacturing process. \u201cFive years out, I would argue that you could see production times on the order of six months,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ABS CEO Tom Choi has garnered a reputation for speaking unabashedly \u2014 so his somewhat harsh comments on the viability of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations came as no surprise during the SATELLITE 2017 Exhibition & Conference. During the conference\u2019s final panel, \u201cVisions of the Future Satellite Industry: Business Beyond SATELLITE 2017,\u201d Choi reiterated his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}