Enterprise VSAT & Consumer Satellite Broadband Will Grow to 9.5 Million Subscribers by 2023

Wilmington, DE, December 23, 2014–NSR’s 13^th edition of the VSAT and Broadband Satellite Markets report, released today, projects overall VSAT and broadband subscribers, excluding backhaul and trunking, will reach nearly 9.5 Million by 2023. This growth will be seen across fixed satellite services in traditional C/Ku/Ka wide-beam and Ku/Ka High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity.

Revenues earned from service provisioning and sales of Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) are expected to reach $8.8 Billion, with more than half expected to be from North American providers. Latin America and Europe will exhibit the fastest growth, while other regions like Asia will be slower to grow due to a lack of HTS supply and lower disposable income bringing down the addressable market for consumer broadband on the basis of purchasing power.
 
“There is a shift happening in the VSAT industry on a scale never seen before,” notes Prashant Butani, Senior Analyst at NSR and author for the report. “Broadband is fast becoming a universal right and Governments recognize that one of the fastest ways to make it available to a large population is a High Throughput Satellite. The consumer demand for broadband is so strong in parts of the developed world that the VSAT provider industry as a whole is changing from being a B2B, wholesale infrastructure provider to essentially a Global ISP,” states Butani.
 
HTS satellites and the lower cost per bit are the big drivers behind consumer broadband in North America and Europe, with Latin America and Eastern Europe not far behind. HTS is also expected to take a fair chunk of the growth in enterprise VSATs away from traditional wide-beam FSS satellites in C/Ku/Ka- band, but there are challenges. “Operators are trying to answer the question about whether HTS will cannibalize Ku-band enterprise VSAT business. We believe there are issues that need to be addressed before that happens, not the least of which are truly global coverage, catering to in-country fixed and not just global mobility demand and finally, the establishment of gateways that address the concern of data leaving political boundaries,” cautions Butani.

NSR’s VSAT and Broadband Satellite Markets, 13^th Edition study is an industry leading analysis and forecast of all key market segments within the overall satellite broadband sector, and enterprise VSAT networking markets. The study assesses the installed base of sites and subscribers in five different regional markets, investigates trends impacting market growth, forecasts service and equipment revenues, and predicts satellite capacity requirements for provisioning each market vertical. Beyond classic C- and Ku-band capacity, NSR also led the industry in forecasting use of High Throughput Satellites (HTS) for the different satellite broadband market applications. In addition, enterprise data is broken down by verticals such as Banking, Retail, Education, Mil/Gov and Energy as well as by SCPC (Point-to-Point), DAMA (Mesh) and TDMA (Star) technology. Consumer broadband subscribers are segmented by Government and Private funded programs as well as by Urban, Sub-Urban and Rural/Remote geographical location. Detailed forecasts of subscribers, sites, revenues and capacity are provided for a 10-year forecast period from 2013 to 2023.

For additional information on this report, including a full table of contents, list of exhibits and executive summary, please visit www.nsr.com or call NSR at +1-302-295-4981.