Satellite Communications Status - at the Midpoint of the Millennium’s First Decade

Bruce Elbert

President, Application Technology Strategy, Inc.

(published in SatMagazine.com, December 2005)

The year 2005 draws to close a period that established a new performance baseline for the satellite communications industry. GEO satellites are definitely “in” as the foundation for extended wireless access from remote areas and as the means to deliver digital content in any form to consumers and businesses alike. Annual revenue reached $100 billion for the first time, placing commercial satellite communications in proximity to highly visible sectors like movie-making and the market cap of Google. We are also poised for new opportunities that extend wireless reach from short range base stations to broad reaches of land and sea, as well as in the air. In this article, I review the key developments of the past year and consider how things look going forward.

Our first notable event occurred on January 14^th, the day I arrived in Honolulu for the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) Conference. Upon arrival at my hotel, I received a phone call from a friend at the National Weather Service in Hawaii informing me that the Intelsat 804 satellite in the center of the Pacific Ocean at 180 had ceased to operate. This, in turn, had taken down an extensive network of links among Pacific islands as well as connections to North America and Asia. It was another wake-up call to users who depend on satellites, highlighting the contradiction between this technology’s certainty in orbit and vulnerability to failure. Other satellites were quickly brought on line to restore services and most users were back in operation in a matter of days (this was not universal as some locations had to revert to old, reliable HF radio for months).

Even with the high-visibility afforded such events, the reliability record of commercial GEO satellites from Intelsat and others remains high and the failure rate overall continues to drop. This is evident from a simple review of satellite history between 1997 and 2005, illustrated below. Out of the total of 170 satellites launched during this period, only 10 experienced total or near total failure. That’s a failure rate of 6%, far less than the design criteria used by satellite manufacturers. I realize, of course, that such statistics are nice but failure of the satellite you’re on feels more like 100%. For this reason, every critical satellite application demands a flexible backup strategy, making alternate satellite capacity reachable by repointing dishes.

The critical value of satellite services was clearly demonstrated during the hurricane season, as discussed in the November issue of SatMagazine.com. Furthermore, the US Army has decided that GEO satellites can offer the primary link of interconnecting battle-field networks at all force levels. According to the November 2005 issue of Signal magazine, published by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, traditional land-based radio links have proved inadequate to serve “Network-Centric” forces that cannot stop long enough to install cables and erect towers. Rather, “warfighers … moved quickly, (and) chose not to stop and relied instead on … satellite communications (SATCOM)”. This now-familiar refrain further endorses the military’s role for GEO satellites in general and commercial Ku-band transponders in particular. This in and of itself is a major development for our industry and will encourage greater innovation in the area of flexible broadband systems using compact dishes that may be operated by administrative rather than technical personnel. There is a very big push as well to maintain these links while a military unit is “on the move”, something which is technically achievable but still expensive to make broadly available to troop units.

The consumer-related satellite sector is bigger and better than ever, with satellite TV a major player on the subscription side of the business and satellite radio now hitting 10 million listeners in the US. In a past article, I discussed that the only technical limitation to these systems is by the radio spectrum allocated to this service. This will be overcome through the use of improved audio compression and higher-powered satellites that could be launched in a few years. In both of these industry segments, satellites, while individually costly, are sustainable because of the large quantity of paying subscribers. Satellite radio is perhaps unique in that its offering is much different from traditional AM and FM radio, both in terms of content and mobility.

The technologies and services that empower digital content delivery for enterprise-level applications are ready for prime time. In addition, the cost of developing this type of private network is justifiable for a variety of uses. As discussed at the recent SatCon Expo in NYC, familiar brand-names like Home Depot, State Farm Insurance and Wachovia Bank have moved to a content-delivery rather than linear broadcasting mode. These satellite-smart enterprises know full well the benefits of a GEO platform and need no convincing. Yet, the majority of corporations haven’t grasped these benefits for accurate presentation of a visual message at all sites and for a variety of purposes. An issue has been the lack of familiarity and comfort with satellite by main-stay IT managers who end up with network responsibility. Such individuals will buy anything that says Cisco on it but have never dealt with leading technology and service providers in our industry. Perhaps this will change with the recently-announced acquisition of Scientific Atlanta, a leading set-top box supplier, by Cisco itself.

Traditional two-way VSAT sales have been brisk, thanks to the availability of terminals with higher data rates at lower prices. Leading supplier Hughes Network Systems introduced the DirecWay 7700 terminal with a much-elevated capability to service high-end data communications applications, and iDirect continued to dominate the government broadband sector. On the consumer side, WildBlue entered service in June with Ka-band satellite dishes and is reported to be achieving good results in the market. Once again, this segment is positioned for growth, benefiting from a greater appreciation of the value of satellite links both as primary and backup connections.

Mobile communications is growing in importance, particularly from a broadband perspective. Inmarsat put their first Inmarsat 4, launched last March, into service for the Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN), a service capable of half a megabit per second into a terminal the size of a laptop computer. The satellite places hundreds of small L-band beams on the earth in the same manner as a cellular network; high bandwidth from small terminals is a consequence of the higher RF performance afforded a 9 by 12 meter deployable antenna. The on-board processing payload from EADS, similar in concept to those on the Thuraya and ACeS satellites, provides flexible means of gathering uplink user data flows and delivering them to the Internet and other terrestrial networks. A second Inmarsat 4 satellite was launched successfully on November 8^th and will add coverage of the Americas. An additional Inmarsat 4 satellite will fill out a global footprint that also replaces satellites that served previous mobile users. The BGAN technology foundation delivers asymmetrical IP access but is capable of synchronous ISDN circuit connections if required. The system is flexible in terms of terminals and data rates.

A new generation of mobile satellite systems is promised by the North American MSS operator, Mobile Satellite Ventures (originally known as American Mobile Satellite Corporation, which launched the MSAT series in the 1990s). MSV introduced the concept of Ancillary Terrestrial Component (ATC), which is illustrated in Figure 1, from the MSV website. The approach is to utilize the L-band spectrum for an integrated mobile satellite like Thuraya and terrestrial service akin to 3G wireless data networks now appearing in developed countries. As this figure illustrates, MSV intends to serve the now-popular hand-held data devices like advanced mobile phones and wireless PDAs. With ATC and a new generation of high-powered L-band satellites, an appropriate handset or laptop can roam from a terrestrial wireless system using cell towers to a satellite under clear line-of-sight conditions. The service has been deemed by the FCC to be feasible and MSV is in position to proceed with its deployment.

Reference: http://www.msvlp.com/nextgen/news/_pdf_launch_/ATCREVNOV16.pdf

The developments identified above all occurred in less than one year and represent several directions of positive action for commercial GEO satellites. I’ve not covered every segment and application that’s appeared and expanded during the year; however, this selection alone demonstrates that next year should produce solid gains for the most capable suppliers. Users on the respective corporate and government sides as well as consumers stand to have more options that give them capability not seen as viable even ten years ago – a time when DIRECTV started to be a recognized name and the entire industry was worth less than $20 billion. Interestingly, many observers thought our industry was facing a sunset due to fiber optic cables and terrestrial wireless. Sunset passed with the telecom meltdown and our industry has a new horizon for growth and innovation.