New face in space

After building the ground infrastructure for satellite broadband provider WildBlue, ViaSat believes it's learned enough about the business to voyage into space itself. So in 2011, ViaSat will launch its own satellite, promising to become a major new wholesale player in rural broadband with the power to compete against DSL.

ViaSat's satellite, creatively named ViaSat-1, will have 100 Gb/s of total throughput — 10 times that of similar satellites in orbit today, the company said. ViaSat will sell that capacity on a wholesale basis to ISPs, which will decide what speeds to offer customers, though ViaSat recommends a range between 2 Mb/s downstream with 1 Mb/s upstream and 10 Mb/s downstream with 4 Mb/s upstream.

Whereas satellite broadband has thus far been best-suited to areas where DSL and cable modem services are not available, ViaSat imagines its offering not only will fit there but also in areas already penetrated by DSL.

“We expect to be very price-competitive with DSL,” said Marc Agnew, vice president of satellite broadband for ViaSat. “In fringe areas, where the quality and speeds of DSL are lower than [what] we offer because of the distance between the home and the central office, we could compete in those markets.”

One of ViaSat's key competitive tools is its focus on maximizing spectral efficiency. Having learned a lot about the geographic dispersion of demand through working with WildBlue, ViaSat initially will offer service only where it expects to see the most demand: along the West Coast and east of the Mississippi River.

“We're not wasting capacity where there would be insufficient demand,” Agnew said. “Because we do that, we have the ability to reuse gateway frequencies throughout the network.”

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