High Throughput Satellites (HTS) With A Glimps on Asia Pacific Region

High Throughput Satellites (HTS) are currently hot topic in satellite industry. The Ka-band satellites are optimized for data applications, using techniques as multiple spot beams with extensive frequency reuse, which means they achieve significantly greater capacity than conventional C-band or Ku-band satellites optimized for broadcast applications such as TV.

Lets look the EchoStar XVII satellite with JUPITER high throughput technology which cover North America with 60 spot beams and has well in excess of 100 Gbps of capacity, enough to deliver high-speed internet service to an estimated 1.5 to 2 million HughesNet subscribers.

This HTS investment in North America area has been justified because of the huge consumer demand for high-speed internet access, with more than 1 million subscribers enjoying high-speed internet access via satellite from the two providers, Hughes and ViaSat. They have both announced plan to launch next generation HTS satellites in 2016, bringing total capacity over North America well over 400 Gbps (Hughes with JUPITER 2 / EchoStar XIX and ViaSat with ViaSat-2). However, not every region in the world has the addressable market to justify the kind of significant satellite broadband investment that we see in North America.

The Asia/Pacific region's key market characteristics are indeed different than North America's, which directly impacts the satellite broadband service business;

• Many different market - Asia/Pacific consists of many different countries, each with its own language and individual culture. The implication of this is that a single marketing campaign cannot effectively reach this diverse population. As a result, Asia/Pacific needs to be viewed as a collection of independent market.
• Smaller market - A corollary is that each of the markets is necessarily a fraction of the entire region. Some of the market, such as Indonesia, are quite large with high population density; but others, such as the island nations, are quite small with low population density.
• Economics - High speed satellite internet access in North America today is available with multiple plans to suit different budgets, with most popular at 10 Mbps downloads for $40/month. Even at scaled down rates and prices, any successful HTS broadband venture in Asia/Pasific region will require a substantial base of subscribers with the ability to pay.

All of this means it is unlikely the region will see 100 GBps HTS systems deployed in the foreseeable future. Instead, it is more likely that satellite operators will implement HTS designs which more closely meet the market reality.

Hosted Payloads Or Smaller Satellites

Just because the industry can make 100+ Gbps satellites does not mean that every operator should have planning to deploy such large capacity. Of the more than 50 active HTS communication projects (either in orbit or planned), the majority of these systems are employing a partial payload for the HTS application (which can be either Ka or Ku-band). With this approach, satellite operators are able to incrementally add HTS capacity into a satellite whose primary mission may be the traditional 36/54 MHz Ku-band and C-band coverage optimized for broadcast.

A partial payload, or even a dedicated Ka-band payload but with a smaller satellite mass (and thus lower capacity), will be attractive to service providers for a variety of reasons, including :

• Small geographic coverage area - perhaps the target market is one country of modest size
• Anticipated slow fill rate - the take-up in developing parts of the world may be slower than North America or Europe, thereby reducing the need for immediate deployment of a lot of capacity. In these areas, it makes more sense to optimize for coverage than capacity.
• Lower capex - the cost to implement a partial payload on a satellite will be significantly than the cost to launch a dedicated satellite.

For these reasons and more, it is not necessarily true that "bigger is better". In fact, "bigger is better" only when the fill rate or usage of the capacity is certain to be quickly consumed. Where the market demand may be uncertain, a smaller capacity can enable an operator to ease into a market with a lower investment.



Dedicated Or Open Systems

There are a number of different business models in practice for the new generation of high-throughput satellites. The largest, such as EchoStar XVII with JUPITER high-throughput technology, provides well over 100 GBps of capacity over North America and operates as a dedicated system.

A dedicated system is one where a single entity operates the satellite, procure the ground system, and offers the services directly and/or through one or more retail partners to end-users. In this so-called "Mbps model" construct, the operator is maximizing its return on investment by ultimately selling Mbps through variety of service plans and there is limited possibility for an independent service provider to purchase satellite bandwidth alone for the purpose of offering its own services.

In contrast, an open high-throughput satellite system is one where the satellite operator sells bandwidth capacity to individual operators (so-called "MHz model") who take on the responsibility to produce the ground systems, develop the BSS, and then sell Mbps service plan through their distribution channels or directly to end-users. This type of model is potentially attractive to a satellite operator, as it reduces the risk associated with a service business and lets the satellite operator focus on its core competency of managing spacecraft.