Back and Forth with Executives from the PTC 2012: "Everything is Illuminated"
by Lou Zacharilla
Honolulu, HI, January 26, 2012-- What is the he difference between the Mid-Pacific Conference Center in Honolulu, Hawaii and the Congressional Ballroom of Renaissance Hotel in Washington in mid-March? 8,000 miles, 60 degrees (F.) in daily temperature and the same numerical gap in the respective systolic and diastolic rates of the people working in them. Despite the familiar sound of a snicker when you announce to people that you are attending the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference in the Aloha State for work, PTC happens to be one of the hardest-working conferences in the telecommunications industry. Perhaps that is because we telecom types take it over every for four days each January.
Yet because of the presence of so much pleasure, it has also become highly conducive to expansive and strategic thinking about our industry. Goodness knows, an industry whose ultimate plumbing faces the universe needs to think expansively now and then.
As the Society of Satellite Professionals International prepares to celebrate its 25thGala, which includes its second Stellar Awards and Reception, held this year at the Renaissance Hotel on 13 March, I thought it would be fun to gather a handful of thought leaders in Hawaii and use a Sunday afternoon workshop at PTC to conduct a think tank. The goal was to begin to identify areas ripe for innovation and to take a look at the needs of Asian markets and landscapes.
I asked Globecomm’s Steve Yablonski, Glen Tindall of SES, Gary Hatch, CEO of ATCi and David Ball, an industry veteran and now with upstart Australian company Newsat to leave their Powerpoint slides home and come unprepared. No ties allowed, of course.
In his book, Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foerwrites that “the great advances are made not by individuals so much as by environments. It is not a coincidence that innovations tend to come in bundles.”
There is no question that the satellite industry contains environments that have been active with innovation. While persistent innovation is not necessarily always apparent, it is found. Or at least, the opportunity to be innovative is present because the challenge to satisfy complex markets will never go away. We need to innovate, in other words, to persist.
Among the areas of note were that each person agreed that the satellite industry needs to break free from an “graying industry” image and begin to attract talent and ideas that will put a spark into it. Upon closer drilling, however, what we learned was that we may have mistaken “old” for cautious. The two usually are seen together, but as Newsat’s Ball said, “Until we are able to increase the number of launches, our planning will inevitably revolve around a product that takes years to build and, when in service, remains in service with very limited capability to change for nearly two decades.”
Yablonski added, “ We need to think differently about how we solve problems. We need more stuff in the tool kit.” He added that the industry is getting it with Ka-band.
The innovation needs to come on the ground, said Hatch. “In areas like product development, embedding new media into the teleport value chain and leveraging our unique ability to reach distant shores.”
Tindall picked up on that. He noted that SES has embarked on a large investment program which will include nearly 3B Euros in all. Eighty-five percent of the capacity will be destined for the developing markets in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, which are key growth markets.
“The demographics of Asia, with large volumes of customers who are poorly served in terms of broadband, create a huge market opportunity for a high-volume high-bandwidth consumer product. I suspect that the market may develop somewhat the way that the DTH or cellular market has in India, with high demand coupled with intense competition driving market prices to very competitive levels.”
In the end, all roads led to a discussion of broadband. Perhaps the most important person in the room, or persons, were Mark Dankberg, whose ViaSat-1 project looms large in this industry’s consciousness, and Suvi Linden, the former Minister of Communications of Finland. An increasingly unknown politician outside of the circles of the intelligent community movement and the U.N., where she serves as a commissioner on the Digital Development Commission, Madame Linden was responsible for pushing forward in Finland the world’s first legislation which declared broadband to be a human right. The law then mandated a minimum a one megabit connection to every single home, building and institution in the country.
This will serve to put the world on notice about the importance of broadband, I suggested. The rest jumped onboard. Globecomm’s Yablonski tied it back to Ka-band systems. “I believe that these systems will prove that delivering broadband by satellite is effective at least in a fixed rather than mobile delivery environment. These systems will make it possible to deliver broadband anywhere. The simplified network architecture, along with the higher capacity (lower cost per unit bandwidth) satellites will allow our services to be cost-effective for data delivery over a larger area than current systems.
David Ball, CTO of Newsat, whose company will be launching a Ka-band satellite, nodded. It looked a lot like the future to him.
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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
