June 4, 2014

NSR’s newly released Wireless Backhaul, Trunking and Video Offload via Satellite, 8th Edition finds the Asian region dominating the wireless backhaul, trunking and video offload market on an annualized basis, leading to over 27% of cumulative global revenues from 2013-2023. The large user base, the topographic challenges and key markets that include Australia, China, India and Indonesia are key elements favoring satellite usage compared to other regions.

Asia’s market potential will benefit from increased competition where industry players will add capacity, foster partnerships and deploy next-generation solutions leading to higher throughput. These trends lead to reduced end user costs via less expensive equipment and service rates, with NSR projecting Asian market growth from $327 million in 2013 to $904 million in annual revenue by 2023.

The region will be a key battleground for a host of solutions, including FSS and HTS. Asia’s need for inexpensive capacity favors HTS, yet rain attenuation issues favor traditional FSS C-band capacity. There is no clear market winner in the region as sub-regional or even country-specific requirements vary in terms of applications to be supported. “Southeast Asia or Indonesia will likely continue to prefer C-band for wireless backhaul, while Australia through NBN clearly favors HTS for broadband access services,” according to the study’s author Jose Del Rosario, Research Director for NSR.

It is worth noting that Intelsat EPIC will deploy HTS C-band, which imbues and addresses the region’s requirements onto a single platform. Future deployments could lead to more HTS C-band for the region but in the end, the platform that best serves increased usage of key form factors such as Smartphones requiring higher levels of bandwidth will be the market winner. “The frequency, platform or solution that can best address the explosive increase in data and video traffic to handsets and other devices such as laptops and tablets in terms of technical and cost parameters will win out in Asia,” notes Del Rosario.