Inmarsat’s decision to invest $1.2 billion in three Ka-band satellites is another endorsement for the potential of Ka-band satellites and the market’s potential to expand beyond simply providing faster Internet speeds to consumers that do not have access to high-speed terrestrial lines.
     “I think that to date, people have associated Ka-band with consumer broadband, and one of our points is that there is no reason to think of it as constrained to that market,” says ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg. “It could be well suited to any market where you need a lot of bandwidth. There is a steady momentum building and you will see more Ka-band satellites. The difficulty in getting Ku-band orbital slots is also a factor. Ka-band is more readily available from that perspective. Ka-band spot beam satellites can also be well suited for higher bandwidth yield.”
     With other satellite operators already embracing Ka-band for the mobile market, it was inevitable that MSS giant Inmarsat would make this move, Dankberg said. “If you look at the mobility markets and the volumes of data that global users need nowadays, whether in maritime or aviation or ground, it’s much, much larger than it had been in the early days of Inmarsat. It is very similar to what is going on in the terrestrial wireless world. People are starting to use smart phones and bandwidth demands are going way up. That means you need much more bandwidth per user session — even if the revenue per user session doesn’t rise nearly as rapidly. The amount of bandwidth you can put through an L-band satellite, with only a few tens of megahertz of spectrum, is on the order of low hundreds of [megabits per second] for the entire satellite. When people start using so much data, it becomes inevitable that you need to deliver much more bandwidth per capital investment dollar,” he said.
     Globalstar CEO, Peter Dalton also was “not surprised” by Inmarsat’s move. “Inmarsat is very strong in the maritime data market and center-of-the-ocean or deep-ocean type capabilities. … We have looked at geostationary communications in the past and what the right scenario is for us. I think you will continue to see LEO [low-Earth orbit] and [geostationary] satellite operators expand their services and become more familiar to not only the business marketplace but also the consumer marketplace. I don’t see us investing in Ka-band. With our current LEO constellation configuration, we have invested $1.2 billion for a new fleet of second-generation satellites, which begins launching in October. Those satellites have been under construction for the last few years. We don’t have any bias against Ka-band, but I don’t see us heading off and investing another billion dollars in Ka-band at this point, nor in the near future,” he says.
     Both Eutelsat Communications and Avanti Communications are developing Ka-band satellites to address broadband markets throughout Europe, and Avanti CEO David Williams said projected growth of the market will attract new systems. “The British government’s ‘Space Innovation and Growth Strategy Report,’ published just before the general election, forecast that the Ka-band satellite market will be worth 30 billion pounds ($40.8 billion) a year and that U.K. companies can take a 10 percent market share. I think that 30 billion pounds is a very low estimate. It is only two thirds of the annual revenue of Vodafone, but in general, it now seems evident that Ka-band will become a large sector of the global telecoms market.”
     Eutelsat is another big believer in Ka-band, using its Hot Bird 6 satellite to provide its Ka-band Tooway service for three yeas and planning to launch its dedicated Ka-Sat satellite later this year. “We fully anticipate growing demand for Ka-band capacity as it becomes available for large-scale projects,” Eutelsat CEO Michel de Rosen said. “We have said that we expect to see the Ka-Sat capacity providing for Eutelsat significant revenues of 100 million euros ($127.5 million) per year from fiscal year 2013-2014. It would not be surprising to see orders for more Ka-band satellites in the industry.”