[Via Satellite 11-07-2014] MTN Communications<\/b> CEO Errol Olivier, cast doubt on those with lofty expectations for the impact of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems. As a leading communications provider in the maritime industry, he highlighted how fast the demand for connectivity is growing, arguing that HTS was needed a long time ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you ask me \u2018what do you think about HTS?\u2019 I\u2019d say it\u2019s too late. It should have been here a long time ago. By the time you role out HTS satellites in different regions, the demand for the throughout will have grown exponentially from the time that satellite is designed and started. We have a lot more to think about than how much data will a HTS satellite be able to reach in a certain region,\u201d he said at OilComm\u2019s \u201cGauging the Impact of Satellite Technology Disruptors\u201d panel.<\/p>\n
Roughly 95 percent of MTN\u2019s business is maritime communications, but the company\u2019s oil and gas sector growth has climbed 20 percent year over year. Just recently, MTN established a Houston, Texas team specifically dedicated to oil and gas.<\/p>\n
Though underwhelmed by HTS, MTN still has plans to use the technology. Olivier said the company has committed to all of the Caribbean capacity on Intelsat\u2019s<\/strong> upcoming EpicNG satellite Intelsat 29. MTN has been very intentional in building a satellite network that covers the entire globe, but when asked where disruption is most likely to come from, Oliver said to look elsewhere.<\/p>\n \u201c[Disruption is] going to come from outside the satellite industry. The demand is high and the cost is high. That means consumption is low. When you have more consumption, you have more congestion, and what you thought was a high throughput satellite delivering a whole lot more megabytes to the region is all consumed. Right now there is not enough capacity in the market place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One of MTN\u2019s tactics to address this demand is using terrestrial broadband connections for ships near port. The satellite bandwidth they were using is then released back into a larger pool for ships further out at sea.<\/p>\n KVH Industries<\/b> Commercial Sales Manager Steve Griffin said his company has looked to address this same issue by partnering with companies that would sometimes be considered competitors.<\/p>\n \u201cKVH competitors can also be KVH partners. If they are delivering a big pipe of bandwidth to a remote drill ship but they want to not allow certain applications like Skype and Netflix that are intensively applications, our thought with IP MobileCast is \u2018what if we could just deliver our network when it\u2019s not being utilized to essential hard drives onboard the vessel that can be distributed out to 10, 20, 50, 100 different devices?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a matter of KVH being able to do something better than a competitor, it\u2019s a matter of KVH potentially having a solution that our competitors can be partners with.\u201d<\/p>\n Carlos Nalda, counsel at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey<\/b>, expressed optimism regarding Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) satellite systems such as O3b Networks<\/b>, which promise lower latency than satellites in Geostationary Orbit (GEO). But regulatory hurdles could present barriers to additional NGSO systems.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real question is, are we going to see additional bands come online? I\u2019m not talking about lower throughput MSS satellite constellations but rather end use of broadband constellations potentially in Ku. It seems that there is some interest out there \u2014 you may have heard rumblings about Google and Facebook \u2014 but there are some challenges there. It\u2019s not to suggest it can\u2019t and won\u2019t happen but, from an international regulatory standpoint and from a technology standpoint, there may be some challenges,\u201d Nalda said.<\/p>\n Antenna technology too was an area he saw as having high potential for disruption, but regulations vary on terminal use from one country to the other. Some nations will draw lines between onshore and offshore use of a terminal, while some lack rules for them altogether.<\/p>\n David Liddle, CCO of UltiSat<\/b> and Hakan Parker, CTO of Proactive Energy Solutions<\/b>, both highlighted that cheaper solutions will not solve the problem either. Both cost of ownership and the ability to react quickly when technology breaks are paramount to making sure that the business case for satellite moves forward as the technology advances.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you are piping in millions of dollars worth of crude and all of a sudden your communications goes down, and it shuts down things for whatever reason, that is a huge cost,\u201d said Liddle. \u201cIf you can\u2019t put people out into the field that can respond immediately, the mean times to repair and respond have to be extremely right on spot because it costs the end user lots of money \u2026 it doesn\u2019t matter whether it\u2019s a high throughput Ka-band, Ku, C band or terrestrial \u2014 you have to be able to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Via Satellite 11-07-2014] MTN Communications CEO Errol Olivier, cast doubt on those with lofty expectations for the impact of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems. As a leading communications provider in the maritime industry, he highlighted how fast the demand for connectivity is growing, arguing that HTS was needed a long time ago. \u201cIf you ask me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":75744,"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-75743","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\/75743"}],"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=75743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}