A quarter century has passed since Wal-Mart rolled out its M/A-COM (later acquired by Hughes) Ku-band VSAT network. The innovative technology allowed the retailer to displace a terrestrial network made up of leased analog circuits from more than 400 telephone companies. More importantly, the network allowed the Bentonville-based retailer to scan their inventory once a day — something unheard of at the time — and helped them overtake K-Mart and Sears to become the largest retailer in the land.
Based on Wal-Mart’s success, VSAT quickly became the de facto standard for retail networks, with point-of-sale and lottery networks becoming the mainstay of the VSAT industry. The retail industry still relies heavily on VSAT technology causing one to ask: Are VSATs relevant outside the retail industry? Are they relevant in today’s enterprise networks?
Developments
Because of their success in the retail sector, VSAT providers often suffer the same fate as do character actors: while very good at what they do, they are relegated to play a few, limited roles. Much has changed over the years and VSAT technology is anything but a bit player.
Dave Rehbehn, senior director, marketing, International Division at Hughes, provides some scope regarding how much the VSAT market has grown. “The development of the Internet and IP protocol support created huge demand for bandwidth, and VSAT is the right technology for hard-to-serve areas. To date, Hughes has shipped more than 2.2 million terminals, and we are rolling out more than 300,000 new terminals a year. We are delivering broadband service to more than 500,000 consumer subscribers in North America. Beyond the United States, the broadband trend is continuing, with many governments using satellite to provide a range of services to citizens in underserved areas, often funded from their Universal Service Funds. These large projects are driven by the desire to connect to the Internet. Our volume production, along with continuing advancements in silicon and gallium arsenide, enable us to make our terminals cost-effective and therefore attractive from a capex perspective. We have also focused on lowering operating expenses through the implementation of such advances as DVB-S2/ACM on the forward channel and IDPC coding for the return channel”
Glenn Katz, president and COO of Spacenet contrasts the company’s current services with those it offered in the past. “We support much higher speeds these days. In the beginning, inbound channels were only 19.2 Kbps (kilobits per second). Today we support outbound circuit speeds up to 8 Mbps (megabits per second) and inbound speeds to 2 Mbps,” he says. Katz also noted the company’s adoption of the DVB-S2 standard for outbound traffic.: “Our advanced encoding algorithms allow us to send higher number of bits per megahertz of bandwidth. The cost per bit has come way down and will continue to go down, making the cost of satellite service more cost effective. Once we reached higher circuit speeds, we began to support higher speed applications, which, in turn, drove us to develop more sophisticated and embedded routing protocols, such as BGP, which is important in the big box retail and financial markets. We have also made big advancements in application acceleration to insure a good user experience,” he says
Daniel Enns, senior vice president marketing and business development at Comtech EF Data, says, “Several key enabling technologies should be credited for the growth in the satellite industry,” Enns said. “Spot beams allow frequency reuse and are critical for the new generation of broadband satellites. In addition, advanced forward error correction and modulation schemes have helped dramatically improve the spectral density, thereby lowering latency and the cost- per-bit efficiency and, hence, reduce the cost per bit or improve the throughput
Dave Bettinger, CTO of iDirect, points to the move to IP-based applications as a hallmark event in the development of VSAT as a mainstream network technology. “Customers don’t care that their data is on a satellite network. They are worried about management of their network and security. They simply want to plug in an Ethernet cable and have their applications work. In the past, we used to sell to satellite engineers. Now we are calling on CIOs.”
George Head, Stratos senior vice president, Broadband Services, echoes Bettinger’s comments, stating: “From a customer perspective, VSAT is now part of a solution matrix. Our customers use VSATs as an extension of their corporate network. Their employees may be remote, but they have an expectation that the connection will work well and work fast. “
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