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Re-Slicing the Telecoms Pie |
| Magazine: Satellite
Communications The VSAT Voice |
| By David Hartshorn, General Secretary, Global VSAT Forum Combine 42 leading satellite communications companies, add a shared global agenda, and mix vigorously in burgeoning voice, data and video markets. Serves millions. The main course, of course, is state-of-the-art service provided at competitive price points via one of the most versatile communications platforms available in the world today: Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs). And the organization established to facilitate their consumption is the Global VSAT Forum, the industry’s international non-profit association. VSATs are not new. Indeed, hundreds of thousands are in use at this instant, providing reliable, low-cost telecoms services to stock exchanges, oil & gas firms, the United Nations, retail concerns, banks, government ministries, hospitals, disaster-recovery agencies, consumers, paging companies, and a wide variety of other end users. Critically, however, new ingredients are being added to the VSAT mix. Low costs are getting lower; high reliability is getting higher; and the enhanced flexibility of VSAT platforms enables cost-effective solutions for everything from stripped-down rural telecoms to fully-loaded multi-media services. This trend has not escaped the notice of industry analysts. Merrill Lynch and Co. this year estimated that the global VSAT market, worth $1.1 billion in 1997, will increase to $4.5 billion by 2007. Another group, Megatech Resources, recently predicted that equipment sales will more than double by the year 2001 to reach $2.3 billion. But the industry has long since learned that bullish reports aren’t worth the paper they’re written on unless they are backed up at the national, regional and global levels by regulatory policies that facilitate, indeed, embrace the use of VSATs for domestic and international service provision. This regulatory pre-requisite is becoming more important by the hour, as demand for emerging international corporate, government and consumer applications explodes onto the world stage. Exhibit A: Internet traffic is doubling every 100 days, resulting in an annual growth rate of more than 700%. In the past five years, the number of Internet users increased by 97 million. Business-to-business transactions on the Internet are expected to exceed $300 billion by 2002, up from just $8 billion in 1998 (Forrester Research). This trend has a knock-on effect, driving demand for multimedia, distance learning, telemedicine, video conferencing, plain old telephone service and other applications served by state-of-the-art VSAT systems. Regulators have taken note. For example, the Global VSAT Forum recently coordinated with the VSAT Service Providers Association of India in organizing a workshop for New Delhi regulators. Topping the agenda was the need for a solution to India’s satellite capacity crunch, which is stunting VSAT market growth (see also page X). By the end of the one-day event, an agreement in principle had been reached with the Departments of Telecom and Space to make foreign Ku-band satellite capacity available for use by Indian VSAT operators. This breakthrough was due largely to regulators’ interest in facilitating the flow of Indian Internet traffic to, from and within a nation where ISP licenses are selling like hotcakes and where an efficient transport mechanism is needed to drive exports of indigenously-produced software. Exhibit B: Rural telecommunications has moved out of the domain of high-minded rhetoric and landed squarely in the realm of pragmatic network deployment. At this writing, concrete was being poured for major VSAT-based rural telecoms networks in Australia, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, and South Africa, to name a few. Thus, it should come as no surprise that regional organizations like RASCOM in Africa, APEC in Asia, CITEL in Latin America, the CEPT and EC in Europe have more than a passing interest in facilitating the establishment not only of national but also of regional regulatory policies that will advance the use of VSATs in both domestic and international applications. So stay tuned. In the coming months, we will take a closer look at these technology, market, and regulatory trends and assess their implications on the size of the global communications pie, how it’s sliced, and who’s invited for dinner. For more information regarding
the Global VSAT Forum and its activities, |
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