If follow the communications and technology press, you know that the world as you know it is speeding through massive change. Market shifts, disruptive technologies: it's like driving fast through a small town. Blink at the wrong moment and you will miss it.
But if you look back at where you were at this time last year and the year before, a deeper truth dawns. Change may happen constantly but the scale is usually modest. Habits and legacies endure. Those who are averse to change – and that is most of us – spend a lot more time talking about doing things differently than actually doing it.
Surveying the globe, one finds today a small handful of large, multinational teleport operators – GlobeCast, Arqiva, RRsat – that focus, not surprisingly, on the still-dominant business of broadcast. There is a larger group of companies – CapRock, Schlumberger, Globecomm, MTN and TCI – that tend to specialize by market or application. And there are hundreds of small operators working in all the varied niches of the business: broadcast, maritime, Internet, enterprise, hospitality and retail, education and private-label services. In November, WTA released its annual Top Operators rankings of the sector, and so I can safely say that the essential dynamics have changed little in the past few years.
Small it may be in scale, but change is still constant. Here's my list of trends to keep an eye on in 2011 and beyond:
Broadband Challenges. There were 450 million broadband subscribers in the world at the end of 2009, according to The Economist's2010 Digital Economy Rankings. Sixty-four percent of Americans and 25% of Europeans had broadband at home, as did 25% of China's 390 million Internet users. I am watching the early stirrings in the US of "cord-cutting" – canceling your pay TV service and relying on TV content delivered over the Internet. (I became a cord-cutter myself this year.) If the trend accelerates – and it will take a long time for it to happen – look for significant impacts on satellite service providers.
Automation. In 2009, IBC presented an Innovation Award to Newtec, Arabsat and the Arab States Broadcasting Union for a Satellite –based system called MENOS. Using IP as its core protocol, MENOS automates the exchange of multimedia content among all the players in the broadcast chain. Think of it as the first automated telephone switch in a world where most phone calls are still connected by operators at switchboards, and look for more automation to enter the architecture of satellite networks in the future.
People and Things in Motion. As local broadband and long-haul fiber continue their march around the globe, the teleport sector is growing its business in applications that have to use satellite, whether it is maritime and aeronautical, resource extraction or vehicle tracking. The good news is that expectations keep rising for connectivity, so that mariners satisfied with Inmarsat B service a few years ago now feel the need for a couple of megabits of IP today.
Mobile Backhaul and 4G. The backhaul of mobile telephone traffic has become a good business for service providers, but it has a limited lifespan. The 4G networks that Ericsson and others desperately want to sell use a completely different, all-IP architecture designed to carry hundreds of gigabits of data, with voice as an afterthought. It will take many years for 4G to become dominant, but when it does, will satellite be able to keep up with the requirement?
Competition Will Rise. The past few years has seen rising competition for teleport operators from an unexpected source: the satellite carriers from whom they buy capacity. The insights offered in our Inside the Top Operators of 2009report make it clear that such competition is likely to grow in the future.
Ka-Band Changes the Rules? By 2014, operators will have put $5 billion of new Ka-band capacity into space, representing many times the current bandwidth on orbit. If all goes according to plan, it will be soaked up by home and SOHO broadband customers. But so much capacity coming onto the market so fast may also have unforeseen effects, from sharply eroding the VSAT market to creating drastic cost competition in broadcast contribution and distribution. WTA's white paper, Ka-Band and the Teleport, lays out the reasons, possibilities and strategies for staying on top of change.
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Robert Bell is Executive Director of the World Teleport Association, which represents the world's most innovative teleport operators, carriers and technology providers in 20 nations. He can be reached at: rbell@worldteleport.org
