Web Page sponsor Viasat
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13 Feb 18. ViaSat-2 Up and Running and Ready to Report to Work. Viasat said ViaSat-2, its next-gen broadband satellite, is ready for service as the company prepares to introduce faster speeds – up to 100Mbps downstream—alongside new unlimited data plans. Viasat launched the Boeing-built ViaSat-2 satellite last June. Viasat-2, delivered into orbit aboard Arianespace’s Ariane 5 heavy-lift launch vehicle, is packed with 300 Gigabits per second of total throughput.
“We anticipate launching the service region-by-region, starting as early as next week with national coverage planned for the end of this month,” Mark Dankberg, Viasat’s chairman and CEO, said Thursday on the company’s fiscal Q3 call.
Dankberg reiterated that Viasat’s target market will be somewhat “granular” early on, going after consumers that rely on the internet more for video entertainment, as well as consumers who like to stream video but don’t have access to higher-speed tiers – in the area of 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps – via wireline ISPs.
To prepare, the company has been testing new unlimited plans on the legacy, bandwidth-constrained Viasat-1 platform, coupled with a “video stream management” system. By the end of the quarter, about 43,000 subscribers were on those test plans on ViaSat-1.
Dankberg also talked up ViaSat-2’s flexible bandwidth allocation capabilities, which enables the company to balance the load in the upstream and downstream based on usage patterns and to pump up data to geographic areas where demand is greater.
“With ViaSat-1, we found that downstream bandwidth was a bottleneck,” he said. “We would have traded back some of the upstream that we had left over from more downstream if we could.” That obstacle will be removed from the equation with ViaSat-2.
In addition to subscriber growth, Viasat also believes that the new satellite will also help it drive higher average revenues per user, by offering faster speeds and by expanding into new geographies and market verticals. Up to 95 percent of the bandwidth on ViaSat-1 is allocated for residential broadband, so its ability to poke new markets is extremely limited.
Viasat lost about 12,000 satellite broadband subscribers in fiscal Q3, ending the period with 577,000, but said the loss was partially offset by growth in ARPU.
Regarding potential new markets for ViaSat-2, Dankberg said enterprise customers are a good example, citing Comcast as an example where satellite delivery could help to “fill in sites” that aren’t supported by the MSO’s wireline network.
Viasat is also developing a set of ViaSat-3 satellites that will provide global coverage by enhancing coverage in the Americas and expanding into Europe and the Middle East and Africa regions. That project has transitioned to the construction phase.
Dankberg was also asked to comment on OneWeb, a platform that will use a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites to deliver services into rural areas, and counts Intelsat, Virgin Qualcomm, SoftBank and Hughes among its investors.
Dankberg downplayed the threat posed to Viasat. OneWeb and its use of LEO systems “are definitely interesting from a technology perspective,” he said. “We are not predicting the failure of OneWeb, [but] I just think that it’s not going to bring an amount of bandwidth to the markets that we serve that’s going to disrupt our ability to compete in those markets.” (Source: Satnews)
20 Feb 18. Pentagon unit is now offering $100,000 in prizes. ON A TRIP to Silicon Valley last year, Defense Secretary James Mattis openly envied tech companies’ superior use of artificial intelligence technology. To help close the gap, one Pentagon unit is now offering $100,000 in prizes to develop algorithms that can interpret high-resolution satellite images.
The contest is called the xView Detection Challenge, and starts next month. Entrants will use a trove of hand-annotated satellite images released by the Pentagon to train algorithms to identify details relevant to disaster relief or humanitarian missions. Objects of interest include damaged buildings, utility trucks, and fishing boats.
The project is being run by DIUx, an organization started by former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to make it easier for his department to work with technology companies, particularly startups. The need to close the Pentagon’s AI gap with industry was a major motivation for the creation of DIUx, says Brendan McCord, head of machine learning at the organization.
DIUx’s challenge is a partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which serves the US military and intelligence apparatus. The competition is modeled on the NGA’s work after events such as hurricane Irma, which swept a trial of destruction and flooding from the Bahamas to Florida last year. Each day, a team of 10 analysts scrutinized hundreds of high-resolution satellite images of the disaster zone, grading damaged or destroyed buildings, and annotating details like impassable roads or bridges. The data was passed onto other agencies helping with the clean up, including FEMA.
One goal of the challenge is to automate such work. McCord says algorithms developed for the xView challenge could help NGA after future disasters. If software could make a first pass at annotating new images for damaged buildings and the like, for example, analysts could be more productive.
Algorithms good at tagging items of humanitarian interest might also be re-trained to aid other work, such as NGA’s core mission of supporting U.S. warfighters and intelligence analysts. The contest rules grant NGA license to both use and build on winning software. DIUx says winners may be offered the chance to do follow-on work on other defense missions. It is also offering a special prize of $5,000 for the best open source entry, to encourage sharing of ideas created for the contest. The satellite images for the contest are released under a public, noncommercial license for anyone to use.
Anyone hoping to win money in the challenge should start by checking their nationality. Contest rules disqualify entrants from several countries, including Cuba and Iran. For those whose papers are in order, the next step is to download a cache of satellite images covering 1,400 km2from locations around the world at a resolution of 30 centimeters (1 foot). The images cover both visible and infrared light, and have been hand-annotated with a million examples of 60 different objects. Entrants will use the labeled images to train their algorithms; their software will be tested against a collection of images not made public. The contest will be judged on accuracy, but DIUx also wants the software to be practical, says McCord.
Software competing in the challenge must identify and distinguish objects such as trucks with tanker trailers and cement mixers. The objects were chosen to be relevant to humanitarian projects, and push the limits of existing image-processing algorithms.
Stefano Ermon, a professor at Stanford, says that the challenge and dataset could become an important contribution to both machine-learning research, and humanitarian projects worldwide. His research group has developed machine-learning software that maps areas of poverty in African countries using clues such as roads and waterways.
The most mature image-recognition technology is focused on online consumer and product photos, thanks to the piles of readily available data, and strong commercial interest from internet companies such as Google. Much less work has been done on interpreting satellite imagery, and the data needed to do so is scant, says Ermon. “We don’t have a lot of labeled data, which is crucial,” he says.
AI in the Sky
- Defense secretary James Mattis wants his department to emulate tech giants’ rapid, broad adoption of artificial intelligence.
- Satellite images can betray otherwise hard-to-source economic data such as oil stockpiles and crop yields.
- Artificial intelligence could change warfare as dramatically as the dawn of nuclear weapons, a Harvard report says.
(Source: Defense News Early Bird/wired.com)
20 Feb 18. Czechs to open satellite center to serve intelligence, NATO. The Czech Republic’s army says it is planning to open a new satellite center to serve the country’s military intelligence and NATO.
The center will receive images of the situation on the ground around the globe from satellites, analyze them and provide them for the alliance’s defense planning and the local army’s use, including its foreign missions. The system known as SATCEN CR is also planned to help the civilian sector in the case of natural disasters. The military spy agency said on Tuesday it should open on July 1 and become fully operational by the end of 2019. The cost is financed by the Czech Defense Ministry. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
20 Feb 18. A new, high-capacity communications satellite that will deliver TV, internet and mobile phone services to the Middle East, Africa and Europe is one step closer to launch. Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) has completed assembly on the Arabsat-6A satellite, which was recently shipped to its Sunnyvale, California facility to begin a comprehensive series of tests to ensure the satellite is ready for operations in orbit.
“This new satellite will strengthen our existing fleet that offers ms of people mobile and landline communications service across the region,” said Khalid Balkheyour, CEO of Arabsat. “We look forward to completing and launching this state-of-the-art new satellite to offer even greater internet, television and radio services to our customers.”
Arabsat-6A is part of the two-satellite Arabsat-6G program for Arabsat and is the second of Lockheed Martin’s modernized LM 2100 series satellites to complete assembly. The other satellite in the Arabsat 6G program, Hellas Sat 4/SaudiGeoSat-1, recently completed assembly and was also shipped to Sunnyvale in November of 2017 for testing.
“Arabsat-6A and its companion satellite, Hellas Sat 4/SaudiGeoSat-1 are the most advanced commercial communications satellites we’ve ever built,” said Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of Commercial Civil Space for Lockheed Martin. “The modernized LM 2100 that these satellites are built on is packed with new innovations, including solar arrays that are 30 percent lighter and 50 percent more powerful, upgraded flight software and more efficient propulsion capabilities resulting in longer maneuver life. Those improvements will deliver greater precision, performance and value in orbit.”
During the trip from Denver to Sunnyvale, Arabsat-6A was housed in a “mobile cleanroom,” which keeps the satellite secure and in pristine condition, free of virtually any specks of dust and contaminants that could damage its precision electronics.
In California, the satellite will undergo multiple tests to ensure it is fit for flight. The satellite will be blasted with sound, exposed to extreme heat and cold, and subjected to a total vacuum to simulate what it will endure during its launch and operations in space. The testing will be completed and the satellite ready for delivery to the launch site by the end of the year.
Lockheed Martin is building five modernized LM 2100 satellites for a host of missions and customers around the globe.
12 Feb 18. HAPS Antenna Support from Communications and Power Industries (CPI). The Antenna Systems Division (ASD) of Communications & Power Industries LLC (CPI) has introduced a GSA-39KaXY ground antenna providing the high pointing accuracy and reliability needed to support high-altitude pseudo-satellite (HAPS) applications.
Operating at lower altitudes than satellites, HAPS can be less expensive to operate and more rapidly deployed, making them ideal for shorter-term usage, such as to support emergency communications during regional disaster relief efforts. CPI ASD’s new antenna is designed to meet the needs of HAPS providers, who require a reliable high-performance antenna specifically created to provide connectivity to disaster recovery and digital inclusion applications.
The new ground-based Ka-band antenna extends CPI ASD’s broad product line of advanced antennas into the rapidly emerging generation of pseudo-satellites. Recent studies have estimated that the HAPS market is expanding at a compound annual growth rate of more than 15 percent.
CPI ASD’s agile GSA-39KaXY Ka-band antenna is designed to operate in open air, rather than ensconced in a radome, with a range of reflectors from 0.90 to 1.5 meters in size, and using PC-based control with a P700 ACU. CPI ASD designed high reliability and low maintenance into the antenna system from top to bottom. The motorized pedestal provides high-output torque with ultra-low backlash through use of two-stage reduction gearboxes and brushless DC motors. For added reliability, the pedestal is designed with servo amplifiers that offer protection for over-current, voltage and temperature. CPI ASD also offers a range of mounting options for integration of customer-provided RF elements on the pedestal.
The CPI Antenna Systems Division portfolio (which includes CPI’s ASC Signal and Malibu brands) now extends across a broad range of products, systems and technologies, including earth station antenna systems (2.4m to 9.4m), LEO/MEO antenna systems, data link systems, telemetry systems and now HAPS systems. (Source: Satnews)
13 Feb 18. SpaceX to Send Spain’s Spy Satellite to Space … Spain’s First. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one busy company. Just last week (during Satnews’ SmallSat Symposium) the much anticipated Falcon Heavy rocket successfully launched as a test for a future Mars journey. And now word comes from Spain that …
This article is written by Matt Ford of EuroWeekly … SPAIN is set to launch its first spy satellite, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has agreed to blast it into orbit.
Named Paz [Peace], the €160m unit will lift off from the Vandenberg Airbase in California, United States (US) aboard one of the flamboyant billionaire’s Falcon 9 rockets.
Built by Airbus Defence and Space, a division of aeroplane manufacturer Airbus, the satellite is owned by Madrid firm Hisdesat, although the Ministry of Defence and a number of private individuals provided most of the funding.
The Spanish Armed Forces Intelligence Center, CIFAS, will receive 30 of the 100 high-resolution images captured daily by Paz, with customers for the other 70 being sought.
A contract with the European Space Agency has already been signed, and the craft will also collaborate with the European Union’s satellite centre.
Its main base will be the National Institute of Aerospace Technology in Torrejon de Ardoz, Madrid, with support from the Maspalomas station in Gran Canaria, while project leaders are exploring the possibility of a third headquarters in the North Pole.
In addition to its military tasks, the satellite will also be used for mapping, environmental monitoring, urban planning and topographical studies.
Originally scheduled for launch from the Yasny Launch Base, Russia, in 2014, the scheme was delayed due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea that year, leading to a €15m International Court of Arbitration legal battle between Hisdesat and Moscow-based space company Kosmotras.
While the US launch is more expensive at around €53m, industry sources revealed that the cost has been reduced by including several mobile internet satellites on the same flight.
Paz will be released at an altitude of 514 kilometres above the earth’s surface before it settles into orbit, and six months of testing will be carried out to ensure it is working correctly. (Source: Satnews)
12 Feb 18. SES and Intelsat Propose Joint Use of C-band in U.S. Both for Satellite and to Speed Next Gen 5G Services. These two major companies, SES and Intelsat, are proposing use of C-band downlink spectrum in the U.S. for next gen 5G services, all the while ensuring ‘continued seamless distribution of video and audio programming to more than 100 m U.S. households, and the reliable provision of critical data connectivity in rural areas and emergency situations, as well as services delivered to the U.S. government.’ This wasn’t the first time this idea had been presented to the FCC.
Satellite companies SES S.A. (Euronext Paris and Luxembourg Stock Exchange: SESG) and Intelsat S.A. (NYSE: I) today announced alignment on a proposal to the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which seeks to protect the wide array of established satellite services in the 3700-4200 MHz C-band downlink spectrum while opening a specified portion of that spectrum for terrestrial mobile use.
The joint proposal, which was developed in response to the unique U.S. telecommunications environment, aims to protect the quality and reliability of the extensive services provided by satellite operators in C-band to U.S. broadcasters, media and data companies. The proposal ensures the continued seamless distribution of video and audio programming to more than 100 m U.S. households, and the reliable provision of critical data connectivity in rural areas and emergency situations, as well as services delivered to the U.S. government.
The proposal, which builds on an innovative model first put forward to the FCC by Intelsat and Intel Corporation in October 2017, sets a commercial and technical framework that would enable wireless operators to quickly access approximately 100 MHz of nationwide C-band downlink spectrum in the U.S., speeding the deployment of next generation 5G services.
The proposal specifies the creation of a consortium, which would be open to all C-band operators providing service to all or a portion of the lower 48 United States pursuant to FCC-issued licenses or grants of market access. The consortium would oversee the governance of the initiative, define and implement the methodology for spectrum clearance, and serve as the sole interface for market-based transactions with parties interested in deploying terrestrial mobile services in specific portions of the C-band. SES and Intelsat have begun briefing the FCC on this proposal.
Karim Michel Sabbagh, President and CEO of SES, said that the C-band is and remains a critical component of the U.S. network architecture. Space and ground segment operators have invested billions of dollars in U.S. C-band networks and connectivity and generate important value out of it. It is therefore our duty and mission to protect the C-band in the U.S. from any form of disruption and preserve its use. The C-band satellite consortium is to be set up to ensure that the expansion of the C-band ecosystem in the U.S. will protect the interests of hundreds of established services and millions of American end-users, while at the same time paving the way for the creation of next generation 5G terrestrial services.
Peter Pitsch, Associate General Counsel, Intel, added that Intel’s goal remains to facilitate timely access to high quality terrestrial 5G services. They welcome the announcement of the alignment of Intelsat and SES on significant details of the proposal, and plan to continue to support this market-based approach, which they believe paves the way for the accelerated deployment of 5G in the U.S.
Intelsat CEO Stephen Spengler stated that their priority continues to be creating a framework that provides certainty and protects the quality and reliability of the services they provide to their media, network services and government customers. Their proposed market-based solution provides a speedy resolution to the U.S. objective of accelerating deployment of 5G services. With Intelsat and SES now in agreement on major tenets of the framework and with the support of Intel, they are confident in their ability to implement this proposal quickly and efficiently, ultimately to the benefit of American consumers and the U.S. economy. (Source: Satnews)
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At Viasat, we’re driven to connect every warfighter, platform, and node on the battlefield. As a global communications company, we power millions of fast, resilient connections for military forces around the world – connections that have the capacity to revolutionize the mission – in the air, on the ground, and at sea. Our customers depend on us for connectivity that brings greater operational capabilities, whether we’re securing the U.S. Government’s networks, delivering satellite and wireless communications to the remote edges of the battlefield, or providing senior leaders with the ability to perform mission-critical communications while in flight. We’re a team of fearless innovators, driven to redefine what’s possible. And we’re not done – we’re just beginning.
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