Research and development remains the lifeblood of the satellite communications sector, but a difficult economic situation combined with requirements from customers for more reliable communications while cutting costs are playing a larger role in providing the direction for technology innovation, according to the panelists at the “Engineering 2010 Opening General Session: Technology Leaders Speak.”
    “Innovation will happen in any climate. We’ve seen that happen for the last 25 years,” said Aditya Chatterjee, CTO of Spacenet. “I think all innovation needs is management support. If company management lets you do what you are dreaming of doing, it’s going to happen regardless. We have increased our R&D budget by about 30 percent. I think some companies are doing it only because they have to, but in my standard frame of thinking, innovation is to do something no one else had done before. … Those things require money to develop, but companies take risks because ideas are good.”
    Miteq keeps its R&D budget relatively small, said Howard Hausman, the company’s president, adding, “We have very high level engineering capability, so we’re not afraid to get into custom products. If the customer wants it, and we think it’s possibly a good product and we’ll share investment to make it a standard product. We do some pure R&D, but most of it is customer driven.”
    Customers also are taking their communications needs to harsher and harsher climates, meaning technology must be more rugged, said David Myers, executive vice president and general manager, CapRock Government Solutions, said. “Because of the areas where we operate — the desert, high seas, corrosive environments — we need technology that both survives in those areas and survives getting there. Secondly, operations efficiency is being driven by dramatically escalating space segment cost, so we’re focusing on compression technologies and shaping technologies. We find that we can get one level of savings in the lab environment and a little less savings in practice, but it’s still savings. Sometimes you can pass that onto customers and sometimes you use it to keep your costs the same,” he said.
    Innovation can help solve some of the bandwidth cost problems by developing technology that can open new communications bands. Miteq is even working on Q-band, said Hausman. “We’re doing work in Q-band like we did in Ka-band 10 years ago — making converters and low-noise amplifiers for people who are dabbling in it, but work is picking up,” he said.
   The influence of military users also is growing, as more warfighter communications are being transmitted via commercial satellite links. “The innovation we bring to the table is 90 percent business and 10 percent technology,” said Cor Westerhoff, CTO of Xtar, which provides commercial X-band capacity to the military. “We use commercial-off-the-shelf technology and do everything we could possibly do to make this novel idea of selling X-band to the government customer work. Because we are a new startup, what we need is a geo-location capability and anti-jam capability. We’re discovering that is the major problem for us. We need something that can monitor steerable beams once you move them from where you are comfortable.”
    The military is pushing for more capable communications-on-the-move technology, but many products “are not quite read for primetime,” Myers said. “The biggest problem we run into is that customers request a small form factor, and those type of products look great and get the customer excited, but the small form doesn’t work in practicality. That makes it difficult for the service provider. What we hope to see in the next two to three years is for the smaller terminals to be ready to operate.”
   Another factor influencing R&D is the need to work with — as well as compete against — wired and wireless competitors, said Chatterjee. “At the end of the day, the customers want a business continuity solution for the VSAT, which means they tend to migrate toward terrestrial solutions. You don’t want to hear that, but they would. What we need to do is build a seamless product that is transparent to customers. The satellite product manufacturers have to accept that they need to work with terrestrial and wireless products,” he said.
   In a direct competition, satellite cannot compete against fiber, Hausman said, but “the good news is we don’t have to. People don’t want to be tethered, and while Wi-Fi is rolling out all over the place. The good news for satellite is that it goes where fiber and Wi-Fi don’t go. It’s the most versatile communications technology available, and there is not a substitute.”