Panelists at CASBAA 2018 in Singapore. Photo: Mark Holmes / Via Satellite

The Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia’s (CASBAA) Satellite Industry Forum today inSingapore started with a bang with Intelsat being slayed by a number of operators for its moves in C-band in the United States which could have an impact in Asia. Roger Tong, AsiaSat’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO), blasted Intelsat saying “they sold out the industry” on the opening Executive Satellite Leadership Roundtable, which kicked off the conference this morning.

C-band and the fight for spectrum was a huge topic that permeated the whole discussion this morning. “This [Intelsat proposal backed by SES] is a disaster for the global satellite industry. Other countries will follow the same route and this could spread all over the world. All the C-band could go,” added Huang Baozhang, executive vice president at APT Satellite, echoing Tong’s sentiments.

But, could what happened in the U.S. really spread Asia and will other countries potentially follow this lead? The panel seemed to indicate that this could happen.

Jim Simpson, CEO of ABS, said regulators have not been that savvy when evaluating the different uses of spectrum. He pointed out that mobile operators haven’t used all the bandwidth on 2G/3G/4G. “I believe Asia is a much more unique market than the United States. Some of the [C-band] bandwidth is really necessary [for satellite],” he said.

Business Updates

While the C-band discussion was lively, a number of Asia’s major operators gave updates on their business plans and how they are performing in areas such as video and data. Tong, in one of his first speaking engagements since becoming CEO of AsiaSat, proved to be an engaging speaker, particularly when asked about the operator’s plans in terms of HTS.

“People say if you go into the HTS market too early, you commit suicide, and if you go too late you die by the side of the road,” he said. “We have been looking at HTS over the last four years.” Despite the humorous anecdote, Tong was somewhat evasive when asked about AsiaSat’s HTS plans saying that the operator had not reached a conclusion on what is what we are going to do in terms of HTS. “We don’t want to jump in with a bent pipe that will be obsolete in a few years’ time,” he said, although he hinted with AsiaSat selling a lot of capacity, that the operator could well need to invest in new satellites sooner rather than later.

Simpson also gave an update on ABS’ business and where it could go next. With 50 percent of the operator’s business still coming from video, the challenge will be to maintain this market while growing the data business. Simpson said HTS was still in “a transient state.” He said in order for the satellite industry to go into new verticals, prices of capacity would have to drop by “orders of magnitude” in order for that to happen. “If you really are going to penetrate the market you have to drop the price quite a bit,” he said.

ABS is also looking to penetrate the government business more. Simpson admitted one of the priorities for the company was to perform better in capturing U.S. government business.

The company is also open to more collaboration with other operators, and even manufacturers when developing orbital slots. “We have 15 unpopulated slots where we could be looking for partners. It can be manufacturers. We can’t populate all of those slots. Things change. There used to be a time when operators would want to do it all themselves but, now, we could look to partner with a manufacturer, for example. Some of those 15 slots are expiring in one or two years. Some are there for a longer period of time. There are multiple different applications that we are looking at,” Simpson said. He admitted his focus is making ABS more attractive and that could lead to a sale.

For APT Satellite, Baozhong said that, if there are opportunities for his company to partner with others to develop slots, it would be very keen to explore them. “We still have an idea to have a global network. We are looking at other slots around the world. In terms of revenues, we generate 40 percent from video, 60 percent from data. We think revenues from video will slightly grow over the next three years. Our video business has stabilized. Some operators are selling really cheap [bandwidth for broadcast]. I am not sure how they can survive.”

Mitsutoshi Akao, executive officer and group president at the Global Business Group Space & Satellite Business Unit at SkyPerfect JSAT, spoke about the company’s plans and admitted that the operator would look to invest more in its broadcast business over the next few years. Despite that, he expects that, in five years’ time, broadcasting will be less of an overall percentage of the operator’s overall revenues than it is now.

Opening Keynote

In the opening keynote, John-Paul Hemmingway, the new CEO of SES Networks, spoke about the industry needing to change in order to be successful. “We need to go out and be part of the mainstream and be bold. The demand for capacity is there. There is real end user demand,” he said.

Hemmingway said satellites needs to become a seamless mainstream participant in the global cloud-scale network community, adding that SES’ customers are going through incredible change. Due to changing demands of end users, Hemmingway advocated that the satellite industry moved to more of a partnership model going forward rather than the typical vendor/buyer relationship, which has permeated the industry for years.

“For example, iDirect are coming into our labs and helping drive our products. The message from this is today’s model of buyers and suppliers has to go away. We need people in this challenge with us. We are cloud scale by design. We can deliver many thousands of connections by design. Our teleports need to evolve into data centers. We need to call teleports something different. We have to go mainstream. We need to build cloud scale networks,” Hemmingway added.