Telesat Announces New Telstar 19 VANTAGE High Throughput Satellite

November 11, 2015

Telesat, a leading global satellite operator, announced today its plans to procure a new satellite with two high throughput payloads, one in Ku-band and the other in Ka-band.  The new satellite, called Telstar 19 VANTAGE, will be co-located with Telesat’s Telstar 14R at 63 degrees West, a prime orbital slot for coverage of the Americas. Telesat expects to enter into a construction agreement for Telstar 19 VANTAGE in the coming weeks 

Telstar 19 VANTAGE will be the second of a new generation of Telesat satellites optimized to serve the types of bandwidth intensive applications increasingly being used across the satellite industry. Hughes Network Systems LLC (Hughes) has made a significant commitment to utilize the satellite’s high throughput Ka-band capacity in South America to expand its broadband satellite services, as announced today in a separate Hughes release. The satellite has additional high throughput Ka-band capacity over Northern Canada, the Caribbean and the North Atlantic Ocean. It will also provide high throughput and conventional Ku-band capacity over Brazil, the Andean region and the North Atlantic Ocean.  

“Telstar 19 VANTAGE is a versatile, state-of-the-art satellite optimized to serve growing markets in the Americas from Telesat’s prime 63 degrees West location,” said Dan Goldberg, Telesat’s President and CEO. “Telesat is pleased to have Hughes as an anchor tenant on this spacecraft and equally excited to be bringing new high throughput capacity to serve Latin America, Northern Canada and mobile broadband requirements in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, all markets where we have a leading position. Telstar 19 VANTAGE will build on Telesat’s record of innovation and provide users with greater choice and the competitive advantages they need to satisfy the growing demand for satellite broadband.”