Market Trends

Ovum’s newly released mobile broadband forecasts show that users accessing the Internet via mobile broadband enabled laptops and handsets will generate revenues of US $137 billion globally in 2014, over 450% more than in 2008. However, operators will need to content themselves with the fact that user growth will be far faster than revenue growth, meaning more users and more data traffic but declining ARPUs.

by NSR

In the last two years, much has been made within the satellite industry of transponder shortages and higher capacity pricing impacting the Sub-Saharan African market. Evidence from NSR’s Global Assessment of Satellite Demand, 5th Edition study details the current capacity issues facing this regional market, and numerous operators have already responded. Some additional capacity on existing satellites has been relocated to the Sub-Saharan Africa market, and a number of recently launched satellites have already increased supply with more to come in the next several years.

Over 47 million homes now receive digital satellite signals

50 percent or 122 million out of the 243 million TV homes in Europe receive programs digitally at the end of  2008. Overall, satellite – including other operators – has again proven to be a main driver of digitalization, providing more than a quarter of all TV households or 52 percent of all digital households with digital TV signals. The digitalization rate of satellite, as an infrastructure, is three times higher (89 percent) than that of cable networks (27 percent). This were the finding of the annual Satellite Monitor report commission by SES ASTRA.

A report by reserach firm IDATE examines recent developments in broadband via satellite the United States, Asia and Europe, providing analysis of the issues involved in rolling out these services and assesses the opportunities tied to the deployment of fixed satellite access services in residential markets in Europe and North Africa.

Germany had a total of 37.67 million analog and digital TV homes by the end of 2008. With 16.2 million households, satellite reached 43% of all German households, while 18.45 million households or 49% watched television via cable in 2008. The terrestrial television DVB-T had 2.75 million share of seven percent, followed by IPTV with 270.000 households and a share of one percent. These were the results of the latest Satellite Monitor, conducted annually on behalf of SES ASTRA.The methodology and the results are controlled by independent institutes. 6,000 telephone and face-to-face interviews were conducted at the end of last year.

The Dell’Oro Group reported that the IPTV subscriber base grew by 3.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 to reach 23 million subscribers at the end of last year, nearly double the number at the end of 2007. While Europe, Middle East, and Africa remained the largest market for unit shipments of IPTV set-top boxes, North America drove the market’s revenue growth in the fourth quarter as AT&T and Verizon continued to aggressively promote their television services.

by NSR

The first few pages of the trade publication Digital Ship offers a glimpse of what is on the radar screen of many satcom service providers in the maritime market. In the last few months, vendors have made many announcements about new products and customer wins for either C- and Ku-band VSAT solutions or L-band satellite broadband services. The recent launch of FleetBroadband (the Inmarsat-at-sea version of BGAN), the addition of Iridium’s OpenPort (which reaches the 128 Kbps broadband threshold), and the continued push of VSATs from fixed satellite services (FSS) operators all attest to an increase in satellite supply and diversity for maritime platforms.

Annual revenues from the global mobile market will top US$1.03 trillion by 2013, when the number of subscriptions worldwide will have risen to more than 5.3 billion, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. From end-2007 to end-2013, the global mobile market will see huge growth, increasing in size by over half (56%), according to the latest edition of Informa Telecoms & Media’s Global Mobile Forecasts to 2013. It took over 20 years to reach 3 billion subscriptions, but another 1.9 billion net additions are forecast in just six years, with the global total nudging past the 5-billion milestone in 2011. With this extraordinary growth, total annual revenues derived from mobile operators will grow by over a third (33.9%), jumping from US$769bn in 2007 to US$1.03 trillion six years later.

 by Bruce Elbert, President, Application Strategy, Inc. and Michelle Elbert

The satellite broadband sector has gained a lot of ground as there are now approximately over one million individual users worldwide. These are families and small businesses who subscribe to service providers that address the individual consumer by providing a dish, modem and access to the Internet. With the familiar asymmetrical arrangement, these services deliver download speeds between 200 kbps and perhaps 1 Mbps; and upload speeds that hover at 100 kbps as a peak rate. Subscribers generally choose satellite broadband because they cannot obtain one of the more common terrestrial broadband services, namely DSL and cable modem. I encounter many who employ satellite broadband and they uniformly find it reasonably good and a worthwhile expenditure, since they need "always on" high speed access to the Internet for a combination of work and pleasure.

Given the sorry recent history of CEOs misrepresenting the health and future of their companies, it would be understandable if recent statements from individuals ranging from Romain Bausch of SES, Guiliano Beretta of Eutelsat and David McGlade of Intelsat, that their companies had yet to see any substantial impact from the major global economic downturn were to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, NSR has recently completed its annual data collection effort of television channels and feeds carried on commercial satellites, and the actual results truly do support these assertions.