Competing with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation drove the wider discussion during the “New World Order” panel at the SATELLITE show LEO Digital Forum, as satellite operators pushed their multi-orbit strategies and emphasized the stability of GEO in a virtual discussion on the future of the industry.
During the morning’s keynote, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg said he saw the Lightspeed LEO constellation as a move the Canadian operator had to make. But the larger discussion made it clear that other major operators don’t see it the same way.
Explore the Show Daily 2021 LEO Digital Forum Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
While SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell provided an update on Starlink, forecasting that the constellation will be able to connect 20 million households in rural America in three to five years, Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer and SES CEO Steve Collar shared skepticism that LEO broadband is a mass market in the way that satellite video is.
Collar, who said that the size of SES’s business is shifting to 50/50 between Networks and Video, driven by a growth in Networks — still pointed to the enormous video market. “We carry more video content to more people on the planet than any other company. If SES didn’t exist, 360 million households wouldn’t get video on a daily basis.” Even in its most successful vision of a future LEO constellation, Collar said, it “certainly doesn’t run to the billions.”
Belmer emphasized that Eutelsat believes satellite television will be critical video infrastructure for the foreseeable future: “When we try to calculate what’s the production capacity of all the LEO constellations, we see absolutely no way, no possibility that those Low-Earth Orbit systems can fulfill demand.” He argued GEO is “by far the most cost effective, the most practical solution for broadcasting linear content.”
But Shotwell left the door open: “I just always smile when people make projections about what can and can’t be done with technology. I don’t think we have any idea how technology can evolve.”
Viasat Executive Chairman Mark Dankberg strongly emphasized the dangers of orbital congestion: “In the non-GEO space, every constellation can literally crash into every other one, or can interfere with every other one. The way those rules evolve, will have a huge impact on what we or anybody does in NGSO.” VS
