News Analysis

by Peter Galace

Moscow, Russia, July 19, 2013--Russian officials have suspended all launches of Proton rockets following the July 2 launch failure of a Proton M rocket carrying three GLONASS navigational satellites into space.  The Russian Federal Space Agency, commonly called Roscosmos, announced last week that a Russian State Commission has been established and has started investigating the potential causes of the failure.

Petah Tikva, Israel, July 18, 2013--Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd.  today announced that it has revised its management objective targets for 2013. Revenue for 2013 is now expected to be between US$ 335 million to US$ 345 million as compared to the previously stated range of US$ 350 million to US$360 million and EBITDA is expected to be approximately 7% as compared to 9%.

London, UK, July 16, 2013--The European Union’s Digital Agenda calls for every citizen and business to have access to broadband that provides at least 2 megabits per second by 2013. Today that’s largely possible. In fact more than 99% of the population of the EU can get ten times that. “Now that twenty megabit bandwidths are commonly on offer and some tariffs offer customers unlimited data the case for satellite broadband has, in our view, reached a tipping point,” says Oliver Johnson, Chief Executive at Point Topic.

Cambridge, UK, July 15, 2013--Amino Technologies reported on Monday flat revenue of GBP20.1 million pounds (US$30.36 million) for the half year that ended May 31, but said its pretax profit rose to GBP2.6 million (US$3.93 million) from £200,000 (US$302,140) as the company benefited from rebates totalling GBP1.7 million (US$2.57 million) on duties paid on international product sales.

Amman, Jordan, July 8, 2013--New research from the Arab Advisors Group analyzes and compares the social media presence of 40 Free-to-Air (FTA) satellite channels in the Arab World. By mid-June 2013, news and current affairs channels BBC World, Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera English took the lead in the number of Twitter followers, while MBC Group had the highest number of YouTube subscribers on its channel.

London, UK, July 4, 2013--Superfast broadband services delivering 30 megabits a second or more now account for 20% of the consumer market in the UK, according to Point Topic.

Stockholm, Sweden, July 2, 2013--Ericsson announced  its intention to acquire Red Bee Media, a leading media services company headquartered in the UK, from an entity controlled by Macquarie Advanced Investment Partners, L.P.

Geneva, Switzerland, July 1, 2013--Countries with a clearly-defined national vision for broadband roll-out are significantly out-performing those taking a more laissez-faire approach to broadband development, according to a new joint report just released by ITU, the Broadband Commission for Digital Development and network equipment maker Cisco Systems.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 1, 2013--Globecomm Systems Inc. announced today that Globecomm Europe BV has become the official new entity of Carrier-to-Carrier Telecom BV and BV Mach 6, two Dutch communications services companies that have joined forces through today’s merger.

London, UK, June 26, 2013--At the end of 2012, broadband analyst firm Point Topic reported that subscriber numbers for copper-based broadband services had fallen for the first time, with 415k subscribers lost in the fourth quarter. New figures reported by Point Topic show that this decline has accelerated in 2013, with 2.77m copper broadband subscribers lost in the first three months of the year. ‘Copper-based’ services include all DSL, ADSL and ADSL2+ subscribers reported by operators across the world. Point Topic’s database of subscriber numbers also includes cable subscriber numbers, FTTx/VDSL and FTTH.