Satellite Industry Needs More Innovation, Says Intelsat CEO

The satellite industry must remain nimble in its innovation and work hard to come up with a “big new idea” to propel market growth, Intelsat CEO Dave McGlade said Tuesday at the Washington Space Business Roundtable. The big question is “how to get to that next level,” he said, using Sirius XM as an example of the right kind of idea. Venture capital, which most industries use as a vehicle for innovation, doesn’t “have a huge interest in our industry,” so a different vehicle may be necessary, he said. McGlade raised the idea of “maybe a new role” for an association.

Although the U.S. government is an enormous customer for Intelsat’s services, foreign governments may be even better suited to the role, McGlade said. The high cost of satellite manufacturing and launching make Intelsat’s services, through a hosted payload or otherwise, a better option than building a whole satellite, he said. The emergence of hosted payloads has helped find a “way to provide certainty of delivery and cost effectiveness in the shrinking budgetary environment, not just in U.S. but around the world,” McGlade said. “The world has changed” and “having an open checkbook will not be the future,” he said.

The regulatory environment for Intelsat is “relatively benign,” McGlade said. The company will continue its defense of C-band satellite spectrum abroad, he said. The ITU is considering proposals that would increase sharing of C-band by terrestrial services. Intelsat is “going to have to continually fight to preserve our spectrum for our customers” and there are “always potential threats by region and country,” McGlade said. Other satellite companies have increased their use of Ka-band, but Intelsat will continue to leverage its C- and Ku-band capabilities, he said. Although “Ka- will have a future with us,” the band is “nothing magical” and is well suited for specific regions and climates, he said. In regions where rain fade is an issue, Ka- may be a problem, he said.

It’s important for the satellite industry to know its strengths and rely on them as a base, he said. The long-term “differentiator” for the satellite industry continues to be aeronautical and maritime services, where terrestrial technologies can’t reach, he said. The industry must also realize where it’s less strong, he said. Intelsat is adjusting through its Intelsat One network, which includes some terrestrial wire, allowing for a combination of data and real-time video, he said.

The Galaxy 15 satellite continues to respond to Intelsat commands and the Wide Area Augmentation System hosted payload used by the Federal Aviation Administration is already back online after several months, said McGlade. Galaxy 15 had been unresponsive to Intelsat’s commands and had been drifting since last year but was recently reset (CD Dec 30 p7). The lesson of the Galaxy 15 is the importance of redundancy, and soon after the satellite started responding, Intelsat engineers added a new fix to allow Intelsat access if something similar happened. A major cause of the problem was purely software related and the company will include additional redundancies in future satellites, he said.