Eutelsat held a meeting and presentation in London on February 18th as part of their ‘road show’ series of post-result discussions. The meeting generated a more positive outlook for the satellite operator, and perhaps needed given that Eutelsat’s organic revenue decline was the worst for the past 10 quarter-year financial statements. Sami Kassab, an equity […]
Affordable worldwide Internet coverage is one step closer today, after £18 million (€20.55m) of UK Space Agency funding was awarded to OneWeb through the European Space Agency, to aid the development of its next generation satellite constellation. A global communications network in space, the system will be comprised of approximately 650 satellites initially and scale […]
A Luxembourg business event (EU Defence & Security) heard that just one year after its launch by SpaceX, GovSat has sold around 20 per cent of its military and government capacity. It launched on January 31st last year. There is a possibility that a second satellite could be bought. GovSat-1, itself a so-called ‘condominium’ satellite […]
OneWeb, which wants to populate the planet with an initial 600 broadband satellites, will launch its first batch of 6 satellites on February 26th. The slippage of just a few days from the original February 19th plan was explained by founder Greg Wyler, saying: “This is new territory launching so many autonomous spacecraft, and they […]
Ottawa-based satellite operator Telesat is intent on building a constellation of (overall) 292 Low Earth orbiting satellites. Telesat already has US FCC approval to build and launch 117 of them using Ka-band, and another 117 using V-band. It now seems that three key bidders for a contract reportedly valued at some $3 billion are considering […]
Tim Farrar of TFA, a leading satellite industry consultant, has shared an idea to help solve the C-Band Alliance’s (CBA) process to free up 200 MHz of their C-band satellite capacity over the USA to help 5G adoption. Farrar said it was “truly ironic” to see objections to the CBA’s scheme from Google linked with […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which plans to girdle the planet with at least 4425 broadband-delivering ‘Starlink’ satellites in a mega-constellation, has now followed up by asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for blanket approval for up to 1 million Earth stations to receive and transmit signals. The filing stresses that granting the application is in the […]
Broadband-by-satellite provider ViaSat (of California) turned in some impressive Q3 numbers on February 7th, with CEO Mark Dankberg saying that a new satellite in the company’s ViaSat-3 model had been ordered from Boeing, and would likely launch in early 2021. Dankberg explained that the progress on the first two ViaSat-3 satellites, “and now having executed […]
The C-band Alliance (CBA) of Intelsat, SES, Eutelsat and Telesat has written to the FCC stating that several recent submissions to the FCC are wrong in their contentions that a potential “market-based approach” (where the CBA sells off its C-band spectrum itself) violates the USA’s Communications Act and is “inconsistent with precedent”. Most objectors, including […]
Last June hedge fund Kerrisdale Capital solidly backed Intelsat and SES over the C-Band Alliance’s likely significant gains from the sale of their C-Band spectrum over the US. In January it emerged that Kerrisdale had largely cashed in on its profits from its stake in Intelsat selling 7.79 million of its 8.48 million shares, and […]