Not even the most senior satellite industry executive remembers the Reformation. If they did it would mean that they have been drawing a Social Security pension for at least 428 years!
It was October 1517 when a fellow named Martin Luther shook the foundations of the established order of Europe with a list of 95 recommendations for improving the system then in fashion. As we learned in school, he promptly tacked his ideas (called "theses") to a church door in Saxony and, open-minded soul that he was, invited experts to debate him. In those days church doors were the blogs of Germany. However a newer technology had recently emerged which had really begun to disrupt things. It was called the printing press. Using the new technology, he soon gained more supporters than anyone thought possible. Of course, because he had new ideas and was using new technology to spread them, it was immediately perceived as a threat to the established order.
As we know all too well, challenging the established order is never as easy as a walk on the beach in Honolulu. The great reformer was put on trial and exiled. But there was a happy ending. Within a relatively short time he emerged to discover that many of his ideas had been accepted. The rest, as they say, is history. The "Reformation" that he is credited with launching changed the politics, economy and the way millions of people viewed the world. It persists to this day.
Let us now fast-forward five centuries to Honolulu, where on January 17, 2010 another "reformation" was launched during the annual Satellite Industry Workshop, produced by SSPI and WTA. In truth it had been launched long before, but for the sake of industry history let us say that during a three-hour series of special presentations and panels titled "Integrating Satellite Services into the ‘Cloud,’" more game-changing ideas were put forward than at any other time in an industry forum. This one revealed an industry that is being re-energized.
The equivalent of the satellite industry’s "95 theses" was presented on a Powerpoint projector this time by someone referred to as the industry’s "Martin Luther." That would be the man with the 100 Gbps satellite (actually 140 Gbps) and a vision with even more capacity: Mark Dankberg, ViaSat’s Chairman and CEO. Mark led the day with a Keynote that yet again laid it out in plain, simple and stark terms. ViaSat-1 is not a gamble. It is the start of a high-capacity model for satellite service which revolves around one simple idea: that the modern economy will increasingly rely as much on the consumption of bandwidth as it does on the consumption of petroleum. To fuel the "knowledge economy," and to remain relevant to consumers, low-cost bandwidth from Ka-band satellites must become available. They need to be put into retail service and become as commonplace to the market’s buying habits as DSL.
Says the heretic Dankberg, a member of the Rice University Engineering Hall of Fame who actually has done his homework all the way on this, "So far so good." The ViaSat-1 payload and bus modules have been integrated and system testing has begun. The launch date remains early 2011, and the company’s recent acquisition of WildBlue brings 400,000 customers into the fold. This will bring the improvements of the new Ka-band technology to over one million new consumers of broadband in time.
ViaSat-1 turns the entire paradigm of satellite, and the most corrosive bias against the industry, if not sideways or on its head, certainly into a more inclined position than ever before. It may be the third most significant development in the history of satellite operations, followed only by the launches of Sputnik (1957) and Rene Anselmo’s PanAmSat (1982). ViaSat’s CEO, unlike Martin Luther, will not be exiled irrespective of the outcome, and the company is far too modest and accomplished at this stage in its history to adopt PanAmSat’s original motto, which was Truth and Technology Will Triumph over Bullshit and Bureaucracy. However he may start a Ka-band race to space, however, in which ViaSat will have a huge lead.
After his case was made, Mr. Dankberg was followed by a new member of the satellite family, Cisco. Greg Pelton of Cisco joined iDirect and Hughes to discuss "routers in space versus routers at the teleport." The IRIS project with Intelsat may be another game-changer, as more "brains" go up where there once merely a bent pipe went round and round. Gary Hatch (ATCi’s founder) and Alan Young next participated on a panel which rolled out more ideas than you could capture. Hatch, a recipient of an SSPI Innovator’s award accurately noted that with IP addresses and much information flowing through teleports, designing value-added services was simply a matter of performing analytics of the buying habits and creatively bringing tendencies, eyeballs and click-throughs to advertisers eager to figure out a way to re-establish relationships with consumers. Young, the CTO of SES World Skies, again dazzled with a report of discussions with media companies and his own studied view of how satellite will continue to look "cheap" as the number of eyeballs grow. "We have a natural advantage when the numbers scale," he said.
Globecomm Systems and its Network Engineering Vice President Steve Spreizer then offered not merely an idea of how content distribution and IP would be the building blocks for the new "media processing center," he went on to show how the company had built the world’s first for Bharti Airtel. Any content on any device at any time was the unwritten motto.
The day concluded and poetically came back around to "The Reformation" and the reformer who led it off when Glenn Katz, the COO of Spacenet, and his panel discussed the demands on bandwidth for a range of verticals.
As the words "bandwidth" and "capacity concerns" popped-up continuously throughout the Workshop. ViaSat’s founder did not smile whenever he heard his premise reinforced, but with a satellite that will have more capacity than any bird in the sky, and a global marketplace in need of access and the ability to watch more and more YouTube and other video (which according to Alan Young is responsible for 27% of all traffic on the Internet and growing) the man most responsible for the satellite reformation had to be looking ahead hopefully to 2011.
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Lou Zacharilla is the Director of Development of the Society of Satellite Professionals International (SSPI). He can be reached at lzacharilla@sspi.org
