{"id":69741,"date":"2016-10-11T19:11:27","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T11:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/kacific-capacity-more-than-70-percent-presold-on-first-satellite\/"},"modified":"2016-10-11T19:11:27","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T11:11:27","slug":"kacific-capacity-more-than-70-percent-presold-on-first-satellite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/kacific-capacity-more-than-70-percent-presold-on-first-satellite\/","title":{"rendered":"Kacific Capacity More Than 70 Percent Presold on First Satellite"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

[Via Satellite 10-10-2016] Kacific Broadband Satellites<\/strong>, a Singapore-based startup with plans to provide internet connectivity to the Asia-Pacific and Oceania regions, has pre-sold enough of the capacity on its first planned satellite, Kacific 1, that the company is now ready to progress without the support of the U.S. Export Import Bank<\/strong> (Ex-Im Bank). In 2015, Kacific was one of the companies with orders for U.S.-built satellites no longer able to complete a transaction with a manufacturer, in this case, Boeing<\/strong>, because of the lapse of Ex-Im Bank\u2019s charter. The U.S. Congress, after letting the charter expire, did reauthorize the Export Credit Agency (ECA) months later, but has yet to confirm enough board members to constitute a quorum, meaning the institution still cannot support deals in excess of $10 million. Multiple satellite awards remain frozen because of the absence of this quorum, but Kacific is ready to move on.<\/p>\n

Christian Patouraux, CEO of Kacific, told Via Satellite <\/em>that a substantial equity funding completed earlier this year became a catalyst for larger investors to support the company. In April, a U.K.-based family office invested $20 million, and Kacific reached an agreement with two Australian private investors for a further $2.3 million. Within a year\u2019s time, Kacific has also grown its firm sales backlog by 175 percent for Ka-band High Throughput Satellite (HTS) broadband internet service.<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks to our large volume of firm bandwidth sales, we have been able to attract interest from alternate financing solutions as well as from other export credit agencies,\u201d said Patouraux. \u201cKacific has now all but completed the work required to put its first satellite, K-1, on track. More than 70 percent of its future capacity has already been sold. Thanks to this success, many locations covered by K-1 no longer have capacity for sale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patouraux said Kacific now has more than $434 million in pre-sale contracts and supply agreements. Many of the customers are governments, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telecom operators across the Asia-Pacific, with much of their focus being on connecting education and healthcare. Ahead of launching Kacific 1, the company has been providing an interim service that Patouraux said provides an opportunity to learn and adjust Kacific\u2019s future offering to real conditions on the ground. The interim service uses the Newtec<\/strong> Dialog multiservice platform, hosted at Av-Comm<\/strong>\u2019s teleport in Australia to provide internet connectivity in the Republic of Vanuatu. Patouraux said the exercise, which continues to provide Ku-band service today, has more than fulfilled its goals.<\/p>\n

Currently, Kacific\u2019s interim service uses a patchwork of satellite bandwidth that Patouraux said would otherwise be challenging to sell if it was not honed specifically for the operator\u2019s remote and rural community applications. The future Kacific 1 satellite is designed to be a large, high-capacity satellite capable of serving around 25 countries or archipelagos across the Pacific, south east Asia and beyond. To maximize its fill rate, Patouraux said the satellite will offer: \u201cattractive wholesale prices, exploiting the elasticity effect of internet bandwidth.\u201d He said the company is taking several steps to ensure it can offer affordable satellite internet.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur system is turnkey and does not require our customers to buy their own teleport. As such, we build economies of scale on our teleport and we can sell directly to the retailer without having to sell to bandwidth aggregators. Our choice of high power, direct-to-premise Ka-band service warrants not only low-cost bandwidth, but also small and inexpensive end-user equipment. We target end-services around communities (villages, town halls, hospitals, schools) ensuring the bandwidth is used extensively. Our trial in Vanuatu has already shown a tremendous usage of data by those types of communities. And finally our team is very lean, and is able to perform because it is focused on one shared customer segment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Patouraux added that he does not see Kacific and O3b Networks <\/strong>competing in their respective primary market segments. O3b, he said, seems more focused on competing with fiber, and relies more heavily on a model that brings large amounts of capacity to central locations for customers to then distribute via terrestrial means. Kacific does not require ground distribution beyond local Wi-Fi or potentially a 3G or 4G repeater, according to Patouraux, optimizing the solution for medium- to low-population densities.<\/p>\n

Patouraux also does not expect rain fade to be much of a concern. He said Kacific mitigates the effects of rain fade by having a very high signal power from the satellite and, for the ground system, with the use of advanced modulation standards.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the technology in place as well as the high dispersion of the Kacific access points ensures our resellers a bandwidth availability over 99.7 percent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Kacific is pursuing a \u201ccondosat\u201d model in building Kacific 1, meaning the company will share the satellite bus with another operator. Other recent condosat deals include Inmarsat <\/strong>and Hellas-Sat<\/strong> for Europasat\/Hellas-Sat 3, and Intelsat <\/strong>and Azercosmos <\/strong>for Intelsat 38\/Azerspace 2. Patouraux said that while the condosat construction model has already been validated in other programs, Kacific and its partner are pioneering on many fronts to expand the condominium-satellite model and its applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis model has many advantages, although it requires dealing with additional levels of complexity in aligning stakeholders interests and schedules. Yet, we have developed a sound win-win model for us and our partner that we will probably be able to repeat in the future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Kacific is furthermore already looking to become a multi-satellite operator. Patouraux hinted that in the future, the company has even bigger plans that expand beyond the Pacific.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are now starting the work for our second satellite that should be much larger than the first one and cover entirely different locations on the planet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Via Satellite 10-10-2016] Kacific Broadband Satellites, a Singapore-based startup with plans to provide internet connectivity to the Asia-Pacific and Oceania regions, has pre-sold enough of the capacity on its first planned satellite, Kacific 1, that the company is now ready to progress without the support of the U.S. Export Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank). In 2015, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69745,"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-69741","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\/69741"}],"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=69741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}