Telesat Selects Cobham SATCOM for Telesat Lightspeed Landing Station Terminals

February 1, 2021

Telesat and Cobham SATCOM, have announced an Agreement to deploy high-performance Cobham SATCOM 3-axis TRACKER 4000 terminals for the Telesat Lightspeed Landing Station network.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cobham SATCOM will manufacture, integrate, and install advanced Ka-band tracking antennas at Telesat’s sites throughout the world, and provide long-term logistics and maintenance support. The radome-protected antennas will provide accurate tracking in the most adverse weather conditions, ensuring high availability and throughput for carrier-grade performance.  Based on Cobham SATCOM’s successful TRACKER Gateway series, the Landing Station terminals offer industry-leading performance, high reliability, and low total cost of ownership. 

“Cobham SATCOM’s innovative antenna technology delivers robust, resilient and highly-efficient performance with compelling economics,” said Aneesh Dalvi, Telesat’s Director of LEO Landing Stations and User Terminals. “The low power consumption of the TRACKER antennas provides significant financial benefits, and is well-aligned with Telesat Lightspeed objectives to provide best-in-class enterprise-grade connectivity while reducing the carbon footprint of our system and maintaining a green and sustainable planet.”

“I am extremely proud that we have been selected by Telesat for this critical element of Telesat Lightspeed”, said Leif Ottosson, CEO at Cobham SATCOM. “It underscores the strong relationship forged between Telesat and Cobham SATCOM over many years. In combining our extensive heritage in tracking technologies and experience developing antenna systems for multiple non-geostationary satellite systems, we are excited by the opportunity to install our TRACKER terminals across the global Landing Station network, and to help enable Telesat’s next-generation services for commercial, defence and government customers worldwide.”

Telesat’s telecom, enterprise, maritime and aviation customer terminals will connect to the Telesat Lightspeed satellites that carry the user traffic through the mesh space network to Landing Stations deployed globally. Each Telesat Lightspeed Landing Station will host multiple TRACKER antennas, along with the baseband, network and control systems. The Landing Stations will connect user traffic to Points-of-Presences for telecom networks, internet and cloud services, and will support private interconnection for customer networks.

Cobham SATCOM will integrate the TRACKER antennas with baseband modems from SatixFy, to enable the Telesat Lightspeed network to provide 15 Tbps of global network capacity. Up to four TRACKER antennas may be simultaneously pointed at each Telesat Lightspeed satellite, allowing efficient use of satellite capacity and very high customer throughput in both forward and return directions.