An Interesting Year for Satellite Broadband

by Elisabeth Tweedie

At the beginning of 2008 Carlsbad, CA-based equipment manufacturer ViaSat startled the world with the announcement of ViaSat-1. Startling not only because of the capacity of the satellite, announced at 100Gbps, (but now increased to 125Gbps) represented a ten fold increase on existing Ka-Band satellites, but also because ViaSat with no operating experience was planning to enter a market dominated by two major players: WildBlue and Hughes. These two operators currently have just under one million subscribers between them.