A report to investors from equity analysts at Exane/BNPP does not make happy reading for SES. The satellite operator will unveil its latest results on October 27th, and the bank is not expecting good news, and is advising shareholders to “Sell”. “We expect SES to report €480 million of revenues for Q3/17 implying an 8.5 […]

AsiaSat of Hong Kong says that its AsiaSat 9 satellite has arrived on station at 122 degrees East following its launch on September 29th by an ILS Proton M rocket from Kazakhstan. The satellite was built by Space Systems/Loral and carries 28 C-band transponders, 32 Ku-band and some Ka-band transponders. It was ordered December 2013. […]

Turkey’s Minister for Transport & Communications, Ahmet Arslan, says the country is in final negotiations with Airbus Defense & Space for a contract to build two communications satellites, Turksat 5A and 5B. Reuters is reporting that Airbus has submitted the best bid for the two craft and it is now likely that a contract will […]

Khalid Balkheyour, president & CEO of Saudi Arabia-based satellite operator Arabsat, told delegates to its 9th Customer Forum in Salalah, Oman, that the operator was in extremely healthy state despite the problems created by satellite signal piracy and the consequent loss of advertising revenues. Arabsat, the world’s 6th largest operator, confirmed that it will be […]

SpaceX has postponed the launch of the SES/EchoStar ‘condominium’ satellite from October 7th to – at least – October 11th. According to sources, SpaceX needs the extra few days to make minor modifications to the Falcon 9’s rockets. But it also means that expected bad weather at the Cape Canaveral would be safely missed. The […]

Research from Dataxis sheds light on the steady expansion of the pay-TV market in Africa. Following data publication for the second quarter of 2017, the total number of pay-tv subscribers reached approximately 23.7 million. This represents a quarter on quarter growth of +2 per cent, and a year on year growth of +18 per cent, […]

The Intelsat-Intel application to the FCC to permit terrestrial 5G cellular operators to access some of Intelsat’s C-band spectrum over the US has gone down like a proverbial ‘lead balloon’ amongst many of the world’s major satellite operators. On October 4th, SES issued an extremely cautious response to the proposal, and since then Asia Satellite Broadcasting […]

SpaceX has this week readied and test-fired one of its ‘pre-flown’ and ‘flight-tested’ Falcon 9 rockets in preparation for a launch currently scheduled for October 7th at 6.35pm Florida-time. SpaceX’s brief is to launch a satellite for its joint-venture clients, SES and Echostar. Described as a ‘condo-sat’, the satellite will operate from a single orbital […]

September 2nd saw Intelsat say that, with Intel, it had applied to the FCC for some key changes in use of its C-band frequencies. Intelsat says that it could release certain regional C-band frequencies in order to help spur 5G usage. Intelsat would auction access to these frequencies. SES of Luxembourg says – in effect […]