Friday, February 08, 2008

ViaSat hires Tom Moore to run ViaSat-1

The ever aggressive and strong marketing always trumps substance boys at ViaSat announced today that they hired Tom Moore, the co-founder of Wildblue, to head up their ViaSat -1 program. The ViaSat 1 program includes the launch of their own ka band satellite as well as providing the underlying services to consumers and commercial accounts on a direct basis. They plan to bring a set of services to the market by 2010.

It's been bantered about by investment banker types that ViaSat would need a company like Wildblue on the same team with them to get the interest of the investment world for this $500 MM+ project. With the hiring of Tom Moore, who in essence was fired from Wildblue by the Liberty Media crowd, it sure doesn't look to me like ViaSat is going to be including Wildblue in their plans!

My own thoughts are this: ViaSat is not happy with the growth of ka band earth station and gateway equipment sales worldwide (which they have been heavily invested in since 2004) and are determined to make a go of ka band. By launching their own satellite, ViaSat can control the performance information that gets out to the field, and more importantly, to the financial community. Additionally, it will enable them to reap much greater profits if they can get the "bent pipe" approach to ka band to work as well as it does on paper. Regardless, they will be playing catch-up to HughesNet, who will make a far more advanced ka band platform (SpaceWay III) available to commercial and consumer accounts in a few months.

I have said more than once......the ViaSat approach to ka band is much less expensive, and it shows. On paper, bent pipe ka band looks terrific, with all of that bandwidth re-use ....but as the rubber has met the road, bottlenecks have surfaced right and left at the Gateways and "bent pipe" ka band has bloodied it's nose more than once. It remains to be seen if the "on board processing" approach of HughesNet's SpaceWay III will prevail......or if all ka band goes the way of the 4 track tape player....