Wildblue Communications....Ka Band Chaos?

The faithful early adopters of Wildblue Communications new ka band satellite internet service are trying their best to make the best of it these days. Seems the fledgling new satellite internet provider and first company to offer the long awaited ka band satellite internet service is having more than a bumpy “rollout” of new service – it’s downright chaotic right now by some users comments I've seen.

Customer equipment is failing after only 1-2 months in service; Regional Network Operations Centers are adding, replacing and upgrading due to inaedequate gateway equipment capacity; the installers for Wildblue have not been adequately prepared for the issues they have encountered in the field and the new customer base of just under 25,000 is growing impatient about the job being done by the NRTC and Wildblue to keep it all glued together.

With outages more frequent than the chief competitor DirecWay has seen in a while, a good number of new users of the Wildblue ka band approach are second guessing themselves right now. There are a few folks who changed to Wildblue’s new service and kept their DirecWay or Starband dish setup's having to rely on those connections now for connectivity during outages.

One of the original Master Distributors not related to the NRTC effort, RS & I , decided to pull out of distribution of the Wildblue products back in September and the CEO (and co-founder) of Wildblue has been replaced with a operations oriented executive from Liberty Media. He has his hands full…as problems are cropping up faster than the Wildblue staff can solve them. Customers are posting dismal upload speeds on the Wildblue user forums, reporting daily outages of 5 min to 5 hours and complaining of “clueless” tech support personnel and installers who don’t follow established procedures during installations.

Wildblue and the NRTC appear unable to solve the problems with several "beams" and in a rush to quell the criticism are sending technicians out to swap out transmitters, modems and cabling...it's beginning to look like they may not have an effective game plan for dealing with inevitable "issues" that occur in this industry. In their defense, Wildblue has been quick to admit to the issues and maintain they have a plan to straighten things out as quickly as possible...a most refreshing change to what has gone on for quite some time in this industry, but it remains to be seen if they can deliver advertised speeds and continue the rollout of this new service at a pace competitive with other service providers in the market now and those coming online soon.

On a separate but equally important front, Wildblue Communications is operating at a significant loss right now with so few customers and will need an influx of operating capital very soon to continue the introduction of services and handle the replacement and upgrading of so much field equipment. I would expect an announcement soon about Telesat or Liberty Media injecting capital or perhaps merging the company into their own…….I would be surprised to see any more money coming from the NRTC – the membership Coop's are also losing a lot of money on this venture and are not likely to be happy with how things have gone so far.

Stay tuned….this is an emerging story.