Satellite Industry Delving Further into Ka Band

Hughes offers Ka-band service through its EchoStar XVII satellite launched in July, said Mike Cook, Hughes senior vice president. With a capacity of more than 100 Gbps, “it is enabling us to launch a whole new generation of consumer services,” he said. “It enables us to open up a bigger market and we compete very well with many terrestrial services,” he said. “We're expecting that it’s going to drive significant growth for us in our consumer business.” Ka band also helps to send data faster, “which helps to mitigate the impact of latency,” Cook added.

The primary appeal of Ka band is the availability of spectrum in the orbital slot, said Mohammad Marashi, Intelsat vice president-strategic innovation. “It’s always been there,” he said. The discussion is focused on broadband services on the consumer side, he said. People want to be connected anywhere, “and there’s demand for high throughput content driven by video,” he added: “Satellite is trying to fill some of that need and is using Ka band as available spectrum to provide that capacity.” Intelsat’s Epic NG platform uses C, Ku and Ka bands to provide global high throughput service, he said. Ka band is a higher frequency and wasn’t used as much as other bands, like Ku or C band, Marashi added: “As an industry we haven’t had to go to higher frequencies, like Ka band and Q band,” which have higher exposure to rain fade.

Inmarsat has extended its L-band capabilities for mobile systems pretty far into the broadband arena, said Peter Hadinger, Inmarsat Global Service president. To get faster speeds, a higher frequency is required, he said. Ka band supports small antennas, which is a really important factor for mobility, he said. “We decided to go past Ku band to Ka band for the small size that improves the mobility but also because we can get much higher speeds."

XTAR provides services mainly to the U.S. government in X band and doesn’t operate in Ka band, said Andrew Ruszkowski, XTAR global sale and marketing vice president. But “in the future, we very well could be in Ka band or another frequency band,” he said. Ka band’s appeal is that it’s bringing a new resource into the satellite industry, “which can address growing demand and in some cases, short supply of satellite resources on a regional basis,” he said.

The executives cautioned against viewing the Ka-band frequency as a replacement for other frequencies or more effective than other bands. It won’t take over the world, Ruszkowski said. “It won’t address every challenge that we might be able to find in the satellite industry.” Ka band is not an upgrade, Marashi said. “There’s been a lot of misrepresentation of the spectrum in the industry,” he said. “I think people were under the misconception that frequency reuse can only happen in Ka band … it can be done in any band.” There is nothing about the spectrum that makes it cheaper, he added: “The cost has to do with what the satellite design is and what applications you're providing which services for."

Ka band enables the next generation of services from the satellite industry for the retail industry, other branch networking sectors and the government, Cook said. The civilian side of government doesn’t have its own satellite system or spectrum, he said: “It buys and uses spectrum that is provided by the industry.” Hughes provides Wi-Fi hotspot service to park services through Ka band, he said. Government entities also use Ka band for remote access in areas where they can’t get terrestrial service, he added. “The maritime industry has adopted Ka band services rather quickly,” Hadinger said. Hadinger also said he expects the broad application and adoption of on-board connectivity by commercial airlines to be driven by Ka band.

Ka band frequency allocations are fairly uniform worldwide, said Hadinger, who also heads the global government arm of Inmarsat Global Xpress, a forthcoming Ka band network (CD July 23 p15). “There’s a stretch of Ka band that is the same in every part of the world,” he said. “Having something that works the same everywhere in the world for our clientele on airplanes or ships is really important.” Because it’s allocated pretty much the same worldwide, the band is generally not contested with other services and there aren’t other services that may interfere, he added.