What's New? Satellite 2007 in Washington DC

My blistered feet tell the story......."Mr. Scott, the Convention Center is only 7 blocks away", the hotel desk clerk said.....I'm calling that the 4th big lie! The notion of a city block takes on a whole new meaning in D.C.!
Our company was an Exhibitor at the annual trade show dubbed Satellite 2007 this year and although the crowd was certainly not overwhelming in size, it was very high quality. It ran from Tuesday Feb. 20th through Thursday, Feb. 22nd and was directed at those who buy or sell "space segment", as satellite provided bandwidth is often dubbed, and the equipment used to transmit and receive it on the ground and in space.

The folks with exhibits, about 230 strong (organizers claim there were 270), spent a fair amount of time trying to strike deals with each other, as they do every year....and then competed for the attention of several thousand attendees......I'd guess maybe 3,000 or so of them actually toured the floor (organizers claim there were 8000 attendees).

The most talked about subjects on the convention floor included how ka band satellite internet is actually working out, how much of a real threat it will be to ku band offerings down the road and the reality check everyone in the industry did regarding the threat of EV-DO broadband in the U.S. to the satellite internet business. There are many very differing theories about what the landscape for high speed internet will look like in the underserved parts of the U.S. over the next few years, but most experts agree that EV-DO cell cards will play a pretty big part of the growth. The greatest drawback to this technology from my perspective is the high cost of wireless routers to move the high speed internet of EV-DO to multiple computers.....too few router choices and some of them cost over $500 - compared to $50-90 for standard high speed routers. The other obvious shortcoming is the lack of infrastructure in rural areas.......and the unlikely haste that it will be built out any time soon.

The early reports of how well ka band has been doing as a competitor to ku band aren't very encouraging to most I spoke to either. The wealth of "white papers" done on ka bandwidth reuse and lower costs associated with this platform are not showing themselves, at least with the efforts made to this point by Telesat, Wildblue, EchoStar and Intelsat to test or provide ka service. EchoStar has just begun to start using the huge amount of ka space it has on SES Americom satellites AMC 15 & 16. And that is for HDTV for the most part and downstream only. It was interesting to see and meet many of the Pioneers of the Satellite TV and Data era at the convention including one of the Founders of EchoStar and a legend in the industry, Charley Ergen.

Will EVDO knock satellite internet out of the park?

2007 will be the year that Cell phone providers like Sprint, Alltel and Verizon push strong into Suburban and close-in Rural territory staked out by Satellite Internet operators and attempt to take market share away. Will they succeed?

When EVDO Revision A (and soon thereafter Rev B) comes out in Q3 2007, there will be a full blown skirmish between Cell operators and the Satellite Internet industry for available consumer and business internet accounts. The territories they are trying to claim are the areas where concentration of homes and business is great enough to build out advanced cell service, but not great enough for terrestrial providers like cable and dsl. These suburban and rural areas have historically been the territory for Satellite operators and some adventuresome WiFi businesses.

Current Status:

With the current levels of cell service available (EVDO rev.0), cell operators are taking a fair amount of business away from satellite operators in fringe suburban areas....why?.... younger users who want to stream video, trade music and video, play internet games and not have any limitations on usage. So far, the cell operators are filling the bill for about $50 or so for the "Aircard" and charging about $59 per mo. for high speed internet....well, sort of.

The speeds on most EVDO plans are about 400-800 kbps download and around 200 kbps upload. Much higher speeds are promised when Revisions A and B come in to play later this year and beyond.
Latency is around 200-350 ms - 50% lower or more than a satellite connection. This latency allows gaming without too many bumps along the way. For those who have been experiencing oppressive limitations from the satellite operators, it seems like heaven....but for how long?

Some of the providers already have a limit of usage each month and it's pretty restrictive (as low as 4GB per month - lower than the satellite operators are assessing). There is no decent data to report on what happens when the network begins to "load up" with users. I was in Denver's airport during a recent snow storm and the EVDO service was non-existent until you were several miles from the airport.....so it's not perfect, by any means. I personally believe that the cell operators are going to learn the same lessons that satellite internet operators have learned........bandwidth is expensive! You can lure people in with attractive prices and speeds, but when you can't maintain those speeds as the network loads up, you just become another one of those lying, cheating, false advertising no good internet providers that we have too many of already! Just kidding........it's not easy to balance a high speed internet network in this day and time.

Future:

When cell operators build out and offer Rev B. EVDO high speed internet service (about 2 years out), the landscape for service will be incredibly competitive. City, suburban and rural individuals and companies will have a lot of choices and the providers with foresight and innovation will be the one's to survive. It should be good for the consumer!