Right now, satellite broadband service subscribers get much less bandwidth than they want. Consumers used to buy broadband for a faster browsing experience, but now they want online media that loads and plays in an instant. Consumer bandwidth usage is growing at about 20% per year. And enterprise customers want equally fast, delay-free access to central servers and network applications when they’re working remotely.

Today’s satellite services just don’t provide a quality experience. That explains satellite’s current position as the “last resort” for broadband. 

Why We’re Developing A Transformational Technology

With sufficient bandwidth volume allocated to the connection, satellite can deliver a high-volume, media-enabled satellite service. We’ve engineered our high-capacity satellite system to make it economical for the first time, beginning with Eutelsat KA-SAT and ViaSat-1.

We want to match average broadband user expectations with our bandwidth allocation, so that satellite broadband subscribers get a great experience that compares favorably to median quality service for terrestrial services.

While acknowledging the risks in such a plan, industry research firm NSR had this to say about our transformational broadband initiative, “All in all, the coordinated ViaSat and Eutelsat announcements of Ka-band satellite construction contracts, plus ground infrastructure and mutual partnerships, stands a good chance of doing quite a bit to shake up the satellite industry. ViaSat has proven that it is willing to put ‘its money where its mouth is’ and hopefully the end result will turn out to be beneficial for the entire industry, maybe even in some completely unexpected ways.” 

Increasing the Gigabyte Inventory for Service Providers

Gigabytes are the inventory that broadband suppliers sell. Broadband service providers typically advertise connection speed. But when networks slow from congestion it isn’t for lack of “speed”, it is because the service provider has run out of gigabytes. They need the ability to deliver more. Our system is designed to provide 10 times the data capacity of any previous satellite, and ten times the capital efficiency in delivering that high volume data.

More Bandwidth Per Subscriber For A Better Service

The maximum potential volume delivered by a satellite is equal to its total throughput (70 gigabits per second (Gbps) for KA-SAT, 100 Gbps for ViaSat-1) multiplied by the eight or so “busy hours” each day when subscribers are most actively using the network. Using this formula reveals these total volumes of bits available for subscribers:

â–  10 Gbps throughput satellite delivers an inventory of about 1,000,000 gigabytes per month.

â–  A 100 Gbps satellite would have 10 times as much inventory, or about 10 million gigabytes per month.

Based on this total throughput, simple division reveals the maximum number of subscribers that any satellite can support and the amount of bandwidth volume that it can allocate per subscriber.

Of course, a service provider with a 10 Gbps satellite could allocate 4 gigabytes of bandwidth to each subscriber, but then would have enough inventory to serve only a few hundred thousand subscribers, and we know that broadband subscriber totals already exceed that by a wide margin.

The Measure of Broadband is Bandwidth

Ultimately, broadband of any sort is about bandwidth, and the measure of bandwidth is capacity, targeted to where there is end-user demand. Our high throughput satellite technology enables network operators to allocate significantly more data volume to each person connected to the network than any current satellite. This economical data delivery is aimed first at consumers, but has applications in military satcom, enterprise networks, mobile data backhaul, and video distribution as well. â–