Enterprise VSAT & Consumer Satellite Broadband Will Grow to 9.5
Million Subscribers by 2023
December 23, 2014
NSR’s 13th edition of the VSAT and Broadband
Satellite Markets report, released today, projects overall VSAT
and broadband subscribers, excluding backhaul and trunking, will
reach nearly 9.5 Million by 2023. This growth will be seen
across fixed satellite services in traditional C/Ku/Ka wide-beam
and Ku/Ka High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity. Revenues
earned from service provisioning and sales of Customer Premises
Equipment (CPE) are expected to reach $8.8 Billion, with more
than half expected to be from North American providers. Latin
America and Europe will exhibit the fastest growth, while other
regions like Asia will be slower to grow due to a lack of HTS
supply and lower disposable income bringing down the addressable
market for consumer broadband on the basis of purchasing power.
“There is a shift happening in the VSAT industry on a scale
never seen before,” notes Prashant Butani, Senior Analyst at NSR
and author for the report. “Broadband is fast becoming a
universal right and Governments recognize that one of the
fastest ways to make it available to a large population is a
High Throughput Satellite. The consumer demand for broadband is
so strong in parts of the developed world that the VSAT provider
industry as a whole is changing from being a B2B, wholesale
infrastructure provider to essentially a Global ISP,” states
Butani.
HTS satellites and the lower cost per bit are the big drivers
behind consumer broadband in North America and Europe, with
Latin America and Eastern Europe not far behind. HTS is also
expected to take a fair chunk of the growth in enterprise VSATs
away from traditional wide-beam FSS satellites in C/Ku/Ka- band,
but there are challenges. “Operators are trying to answer the
question about whether HTS will cannibalize Ku-band enterprise
VSAT business. We believe there are issues that need to be
addressed before that happens, not the least of which are truly
global coverage, catering to in-country fixed and not just
global mobility demand and finally, the establishment of
gateways that address the concern of data leaving political
boundaries,” cautions Butani.
