[Satellite News 02-03-10] Technical problems on the W2A satellite have been a major setback for Solaris Mobile, CEO Steve Maine told Satellite News.
    The joint venture of rivals SES Astra and Eutelsat Communications placed W2A in orbit in April to target the mobile services market in Europe. The satellite then experienced an anomaly in July, which created a difficult situation for the incoming CEO, who Solaris Mobile charged with making the W2A project a success.
    In the following interview, Maine discussed both the setbacks of the W2A satellite as well as his company’s plans to resolve these challenges in 2010.   

Maine: It is, of course, a significant set back. We announced back in May that we had a problem with the satellite’s antenna. We now have a satellite payload that does not work properly. We think we understand very well the nature of the problem. There is a deformation in the surface of the antenna which makes it difficult to focus all of the power of the payload into the right parts of Europe. We need to move on quickly to the next satellite, and this is a key requirement for us, to move the company into a fully commercial phase, but there is no getting away from it that this is a major setback for us.
    It is difficult to put a percentage figure in terms of what will be lost. You have coverage, power and you have throughput, and it is throughput where we are going to suffer. The services we have running in France at the moment on the hybrid network, which we announced recently, have about six to seven TV channels and the same number of radio services, and that is about the limit we will be able to achieve within that one beam. That is one of two beams. We estimate we will be able to do the same thing with the other beam over a much larger area.

Maine: We are fortunate that we had residual capacity on the satellite. We can, however, use it for pre-commercial and commercial services. We are making the best of what we have. The electronics on the satellite work perfectly. The problem only impacts the S-band payload. The other payloads work perfectly, as they use other antennas. We have done a lot of testing with the satellite since then, and we are very confident that the antenna is stable. We have also identified what we can do with the payload that is left. We can skew the antenna a little bit and focus the energy, to the extent we can, on the main land mass of Europe and meet the coverage requirements that we undertook under the spectrum allocation process. It means that we can at least start with the development and delivery of services and lead to the deployment of our next space segment. That has been going on since May of last year.

Maine: Originally, the satellite was specified to provide coverage of Europe over six spot beams. Essentially, two of those beams are broadly usable, but because of the defocusing effect, we will still be able to provide broad coverage of Europe with a little less power than would have been the case if we had had six spot beams. Where it really impacts us is in term of throughput. We won’t be able to support the number of services with the damaged satellite that we would have been able to do if it had been working properly.
   

Maine: Plans for our next satellite are being accelerated as a result of what has happened. That is present tense rather than future. It was always part of the plan, but you always anticipate that things could go wrong, so we are in a position to react to that. Having plans for a follow-up satellite are always part of the plan. We have started work on that already. We hope to come to a conclusion as soon as possible. We are well advanced in those evaluations, however. We will be able to meet the requirements of the spectrum process with one other satellite. Obviously, if the services become hugely successful, we can start looking at others as well.

Maine: I think we will be. I think we will use the satellite to the limit relatively quickly. We have got plans to exploit that as quickly as we possibly can and as broadly as we can. We want to put as many applications on as possible.

Maine: The simple answer is,yes. It will obviously have an impact on the potential take-up of these new services that might be rolled out. It does not remove the market opportunity, but it impacts our view on the rate of the rollout of services and the rate at which they might be taken up. That has introduced new challenges into our planning. We are having to revisit and review and revise our business plans because of the changing economic conditions. That is a key uncertainty.
    One of the key impacts of having a problem with the satellite, is that it has slowed us down in terms of the development of new S-band equipment as well as the development of relationships with service providers. Therefore, it has slowed down a growing consensus on formats.