ViaSat is one of the innovators in the satellite industry and its chairman & CEO, Mark Dankberg, a previous winner of our Satellite Executive of the Year award, has been a vocal proponent for change. And the company showed the world that they mean business with the eagerly awaited announcement for the new ViaSat 2 satellite, which sees ViaSat once again pushing the technology boundaries of what a satellite can do. Dankberg talks about the ViaSat 2 story in-depth and why it took so long for the company to eventually get everything lined up for this exciting new project.

VIA SATELLITE: I want to rewind to Comsys 2010, when you spoke about how a ViaSat 2 announcement was likely to occur in 2011. What happened between 2011 and 2013 to delay the order? How frustrating was it for you not getting this over the line in 2011 and 2012?

Dankberg: One of the things we have said pretty consistently about the timing of the contract for ViaSat 2 is that it is a complex satellite system and we want to be sure it provides the advantages we’re aiming for. It took a while to get the combination of functional performance and economics that we wanted. It wasn’t because the satellite manufacturers were not doing a good job, it was because it was a complicated thing to do. Yes, we were a little bit frustrated that we didn’t have it under contract, but on the other hand, we were excited at the progress we were making. When we started it wasn’t clear that it was even going to be possible. The longer we worked on it, the clearer it became we could get where we wanted.

VIA SATELLITE: What was the number one key learning during that process?

Dankberg: There are technical design issues that people had not really had to deal with before. Obviously, we want more bandwidth but we also want to lower the cost of that bandwidth. So, the economics have to be good. You are working on some technologies that will drive up the amount of bandwidth but that might drive up the cost in a way that you don’t want. What we were working on was a combination of things that would drive up the bandwidth and bring down the costs. Besides that, we wanted a lot of geographic coverage and a lot of flexibility on where we could allocate that bandwidth. That combination of things had not been accomplished, which is why we were not able to make the announcement. At some different points in time, you may progress in certain dimensions, but in others you don’t – you drive down bandwidth costs, and you lose flexibility. We had to keep iterating on what our design approach was to optimize all those factors together.

VIA SATELLITE: Likewise at SATELLITE 2013, you spoke of how challenging it was to raise the bar from ViaSat 1, yet a month later you did. At the time of the conference, was the deal all but signed?

Dankberg: I would say things were converging quite a bit by the end of last summer. These are really complex systems; our view is you are never really done until you are done and the contract is executed. We didn’t want to talk about what we thought we could do until we had it completely worked out.

VIA SATELLITE: A lot of people expected Lockheed Martin to get this deal, yet you went with Boeing. Was this a really tough decision?

Dankberg: It was a lot of work to come up with proposals and designs for ViaSat 2. We really appreciate the work that both companies put in. At the end, it was a question of three main things: schedule, price and risk – and Boeing had the advantage overall.

VIA SATELLITE:: Do you expect the process to take as long next time as it did with ViaSat 2?

Dankberg: We think in terms of generations. ViaSat 1 represented a generation and we bought one of those. ViaSat 2 represents a second generation. I am not sure how many of them we will buy. We have a third generation that we started working on three to four years ago; the total schedule on that one will be quite a bit longer than ViaSat 2, but because we’ve started several years ago, it might appear shorter externally. The satellite manufacturing process for this class of satellites is about three years and one of the things we would like to do is make that shorter. If you think of the objectives when buying a satellite, they include increasing bandwidth, decreasing costs, increase coverage and flexibility, and decreasing manufacturing lead time. Some of those factors are driven by the spacecraft itself, and lot of them are driven by the payload – particularly with the types of satellite we are doing. We are working on payload electronics. If you look at the building blocks available now, you have only a limited amount of design space to work in. We need new parts and once we get them, I think we will be able to combine them in ways that provide the improvements that we need in all the areas that we want.

VIA SATELLITE: Is there enough innovation going on satellite manufacturing?

Dankberg: We look at satellite networks as complete systems. Some of these things that we are doing on these satellites would be impossible to use given the state of ground networking equipment; you have to work on space and ground systems in parallel so things converge. An example would be in the cellular world. If you think of a satellite like a base station, it would be no good to improve base station technology without the handsets to go with them. It is hard for a satellite manufacturer to decide the direction they need to go in on their own. What we are trying to do is innovate on the parts that we are good at, which are the network and payload parts, we only insert new technology if that’s the only way to achieve our overall objectives. We work with the satellite manufacturers to combine our payload designs with their spacecraft technologies and in some cases, spacecraft modifications are needed to support the payload approaches we’re developing. So far, we’ve had good interest from the satellite manufacturers to work with us on these system designs.

VIA SATELLITE: What spacecraft technologies are needed?

Dankberg: A lot of them are particular to the payload techniques that we are doing. From the spacecraft perspective, changes could involve structural, mechanical packaging, thermal, or other design attributes. All these depend on how the payload works and how it is physically built and placed on the spacecraft. If you think about all the possible design approaches you can use to make a satellite design effective, the notion that it should have x amount of transponders and a small number of antennas is a pretty limiting one. A lot of companies buy satellites that way now because they have found value for them – but that is only one way to build a satellite.

VIA SATELLITE: Is ViaSat 2 a catalyst for a more international play?

Dankberg: The short answer is yes. Our value proposition is that we are trying to deliver lots of bandwidth at a pretty low cost. We think this is the basis for an Internet access value proposition that appeals a lot of different markets. But, setting aside the bandwidth, there are regulatory issues in many markets. In some, only a domestic company is able to deliver home Internet services and that company might not even be allowed to deliver those services via satellite. There are also market-centric risks around branding, distribution, and service positioning. All of these things can take time to work. Now that we have ViaSat 2 underway and a broad geographic coverage, it will give us an opportunity to work these issues.

VIA SATELLITE: Is there a Latin America play for ViaSat now with ViaSat 2?

Dankberg: ViaSat 2 covers a fair amount of Latin America. We are trying to work on it.