In serving its cruise and yacht customers in the Caribbean, MTN found the most logical option in a Ku-band system, leveraging the first Intelsat EpicNG satellite, Intelsat 29e, to provide more than 2 gigabits of capacity. MTN Satellite Communications President and CEO Errol Olivier spoke with Satellite News about why his company chose EpicNG over newer Ka-band systems and the unique role that specific satellite bandwidths will play in maritime regions.

 

 

Olivier: The strategy of deploying a spot-beam technology over our very concentrated areas of business really came from within MTN. As we started looking at all the companies out there that we were interested in partnering with, we actually approached Intelsat and worked closely with them to form an understanding of what it was we were trying to build and what our customer demands were. One of the main reasons we picked Intelsat is because of their global fleet of assets.

   What we really like about their EpicNG is that it’s not a consumer-grade solution, but a carrier-grade solution, which makes sense for us since we’re more of a carrier-class service provider. The new Intelsat satellite is going to provide four- to five-times the amount of capacity as a traditional satellite and that’s going to allow us to meet our customer demands, which require a lot more throughput than what they’re getting today. Those demands are going to intensify beyond that in the future, as more customers require the at-home connectivity experience wherever they are in the world. We’re going to have to push the bar.

 

 

Olivier: When you work with such a specialized infrastructure, you will always have concerns about delays and needing more capacity. What if the capacity sells out so fast and you need more space somewhere else? Intelsat had some great assets all over the world in Ku-band and C-band and it was really easy for us to form this partnership. We actually helped Intelsat out with the design of this payload and the whole launch of this satellite, which was a springboard for them. As our customers veer out of regions where we have specialized payloads, we can easily migrate them to another Ku-band satellite. It’s nice to have Intelsat in support, but we also have all those other carriers and operators available, as well. That’s what is so unique about the EpicNG setup.

 

 

Olivier: We choose Ku-band for a number of reasons. There are a lot of benefits to having a Ka-band network but one of the big downsides to the bandwidth is rain fade. If you look at the regions where we operate the most, like the Caribbean, you’ll see that we have to be concerned about rain fade. We would have a big problem trying to get on smaller antennas in a tropical weather environment. The efficiencies in using Ku-band compared to Ka-band come out to be about the same for the same amount of power, power density and rainfall in our regions. This Ku-band infrastructure that we’re going to have with Intelsat is going to be backward- and forward-compatible with everything that’s out there today. When our customers roam outside of a high-throughput capacity region, we can just do an automatic beam switch onto another satellite and the customer stays connected seamlessly.

 

 

Olivier: No, we intend to apply Ka-band where it will fit and there are some niche areas where we think we will augment our services. The problem we have with Ka-band right now is that it is a closed network. Inmarsat GlobalXpress, for example, is not going to work with Telenor’s Thor satellite system or with ViaSat’s Ka-band satellite. All of those systems work on proprietary networks and you can’t just roam from one Ka-band network to the other. In our case with EpicNG, you’ll be able to roam from our Ku-band spot beam onto a traditional Ku-band regional beam anywhere in the world.

 

 

Olivier: The problem with C-band is that we’re trying to design systems that shrink the size of our infrastructure and antennas. It’s very difficult to get a C-band terminal size below 1 meter unless you’re using spread-spectrum technology.

 

 

Olivier: We’ll use the EpicNG platform to some degree for those customers, but we will make additional announcements in the coming months that pull everything together. For us to serve our customers in the cruise and the yacht markets, we have to do a lot more than just design high-throughput satellites. We have a lot of infrastructure that we’re building behind the scenes to deliver a different kind of service. We’re not quite ready to talk about those publicly, yet. We’re working closely with some customers for the launch of those solutions.