VSAT 2013 Highlight Disruptive Technologies

by Virgil Labrador, Editor-in-Chief

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 21, 2013--Informa Telecoms & Media partnered with Comsys this year to produce the 15th annual VSAT 2013 conference,  in a new venue—Amsterdam, the Netherlands.   The conference was  held the day after the IBC 2013 convention and there has been some spillover attendance from IBC, which resulted in slightly higher attendance numbers this year. 

The global VSAT market is in good shape and had positive growth in 2012, according to Simon Bull, senior consultant at Comsys, who gave the keynote address on the state of the VSAT market. Bull said terminal sales grew to 345,000 in 2012, up 16 percent compared to the previous year, and that 2013 also looks encouraging. In 2012, sites in service also went up 5 percent to 1.7 million globally in 2012, as well as consumer subscribers growing 10 percent last year as well, he said.

Fiber is the catalyst driving lower VSAT site growth, said Bull. The extension of the enterprise is increasing the necessity of ubiquity, he added.

In the changing multiplatform environment, despite the simplicity of IP, networks and applications are increasingly becoming complex, according to Bull.  VSATs will always have a place in the provision of solutions, he concluded.

The conference featured a mix of company presentations and panel discussions on various issues affecting the VSAT market.   The common theme among the presentations and panels were “disruptive technologies” and how they are impacting the industry.  

Some of the presentations included topics such as “Hosted Payloads,”  “The Future of Hybrid and Network Services and “Enabling New Applications over Satellite,” among others.

One key development that would be impacting the VSAT market is the influx of High Throughput Satellites (HTS) in various regions.    In the panel discussion on “Maximizing the Potential of High Throughput Satellites,” the session moderator, Christopher Baugh, President of NSR, said that the total HTS/MEO-HTS demand could reach 1 Tbps by 2022 while supply will exceed 2.3 Tbps.   The panelists discussed the potential impact of HTS satellites on pricing and traditional service providers and teleports.

In his presentation entitled “The Next Wave: How the Next Generation of Multi-spot Beam Satellites are Bringing a New Wave to the Industry,” Amiram Levinberg, Founder and Chairman of Gilat Satellite Networks said that the evolving market in the next wave will be characterized by significantly higher number of ventures; selective coverage; flexible topologies; multiple  applications and a more flexible ecosystem. 

The two-day conference was capped  by a  reception that featured the First Annual VSAT Awards, which presented Hughes Network Systems as the “Service Provider of the Year,” among other awardees.