Scheduled Reports

Look for the following reports and projects from WTA in the coming months.

The DVB-NIP Revolution

The past decade has not been kind to satellite-delivered TV, whether direct to home or to cable TV systems. The share of Americans who say they watch TV via cable or satellite plunged from 76% in 2015 to 56% in 2021, according to Pew Research. This decline has been in motion for many years, offset by continued growth in the Asia-Pacific in Europe. Ampere Analysis is now predicting that will change in 2024, which will see the first-ever annual decline in global pay TV penetration. The broadcast industry, and the companies serving it, have not been standing still. One development with potentially large impact is work on a DVB-NIP standard, with NIP standing for Native IP. The goal is to have a single converged platform capable of natively streaming incoming video to all devices on the home or business network, while allowing targeted ad insertion, regionalization and other high-value services. In this report, WTA asks broadcast-focused teleport operators and the vendors presenting them with solutions about the new capabilities DVB-NIP can bring, their impact on providers that are already deep into supporting streaming video, and the opportunity to find new growth niches for video over satellite.

Tomorrow’s Business Model: From Teleport to Network Services

The business of basic uplinking long ago lost most of its commercial value, and teleport operators moved into value-added services tailored to the unique needs of niche markets to ensure their future. Today the industry stands on the brink of a transformation every bit as big: from operating these technical facilities and niche-market services to becoming network service providers. The two models are hardly exclusive. In fact, the biggest opportunities of the future will require the technology and business practices of network operators to integrate multi-orbit satcom in all its complexity with the multiple paths of terrestrial telecom in a seamless whole. The open API standards emerging from the TM Forum and Metro Ethernet Forum will enable such integration to cross networks and power infrastructure sharing where it makes business sense. At the same time, new categories of customers will find benefit in satellite’s ability to connect without touching the terrestrial network, so that private networks for critical infrastructure can be truly safe from cyber threats. Ultimately, having the technology, structure and knowledge to adapt to these changing opportunities will become the greater competitive advantage of all.

Ground Segment for the VHTS Generation

While all eyes may be on low Earth orbit, the real story is about high-throughput satellites (HTS) and VHTS flying in GEO, MEO and LEO. Since the first HTS satellite, IPSTAR, was launched in 2005, the frequency-sharing, multi-beam architecture it pioneered has become standard in LEO and MEO satcom. Intelsat’s decision to launch its EPIC Ku-band HTS satellites made clear that it would become common in GEO as well. Then came the very high-throughput birds Jupiter 3 with its 500 Gbps and ViaSat 3 with its Terabit of capacity (sharply degraded on the first satellite by an antenna problem). All of this has stacked up challenges for the ground segment. Hub infrastructure must scale to support hundreds of beams, support dynamic allocation of return channels and waveform optimization, handle higher symbol rates and greater throughput. Advanced network management will be needed to handle multi-orbit, multi-beam, multi-satellite handovers. In this report, teleport and technology executives report on the technical, operational and business challenges they face and the paths they are navigating to achieve profitable growth while meeting new needs.

AI in the Teleport: The Next Bubble or the Next Great Innovation?

When artificial intelligence exploded on the scene at the end of 2022, it quickly led to visions of amazing new applications, massive job disruption and end-of-the-world scenarios. The reality has turned out to be more complex and slower to deliver real impact beyond creating images from text instruction, impersonating famous people and hallucinating false information. Experts now predict that the penetration of AI into the market will be largely invisible as it is integrated into products and services. They also expect it to take far longer than predicted to have a real impact, because business processes need to evolve to benefit, just as they did following the commercialization of electricity and information technology. In this report, WTA shares the plans and actions of teleport operators, satellite operators and technology vendors in this, the dawning of AI-enabled business.

The Year of the NGSOs

By the end of 2023, Starlink estimated that it had more than 2 million subscribers around the world. In 2024 and into 2025, its deployments and customer acquisition will go on at a record pace, including growing penetration of business markets and spacecraft providing basic space-to-ground service to conventional mobile phones. The OneWeb service roll-out will accelerate. SES mPower will start service, move O3B customers to the new network and gain new customers. And Amazon Kuiper will launch satellites and service. In this report, WTA asks teleport, satellite and technology executives the critical questions. How will the GEO operators – the mainstay of teleport connectivity – respond? How will it affect their teleport partners? How will the teleport business model continue to adapt to a market of verticalized connectivity? What technology innovations may preserve and extend their competitive advantage?

SD-WAN for Competitive Advantage and Revenue Growth

Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) architecture allows networks to combine different transport services into a virtual wide area network that adapts to changing availability and throughput. Widespread in terrestrial communications, it is being greeted in the satellite communications business as a potential game-changer for its power to deliver high reliability and quality of service while making more efficient use of bandwidth. But implementing SD-WAN is not only technically complex, it forces ground segment operations to adopt a digital-first mindset. In this report, WTA explores with engineering and operations executives their tips, tricks and use cases that demonstrate the near-term value and long-term potential of SD-WAN to generate competitive advantage and accelerated revenue growth.

The Teleport Business Model in a Software-Driven World

Successful teleport operators are masters of the pivot: adapting their business models to the needs of changing markets. The bare-bones uplinks of the Eighties evolved into outsourced broadcast centers and providers of cruise and maritime services, business networks, secure military satcom and internet trunking. Today, explosive growth in the space business is confronting the industry with its biggest pivot yet. Competition from Starlink is already driving down pricing for core transmission services, and three more LEO constellations will be launching service in the next three years. They will bring new demand for gateways but also challenge the economics and the core value-add of many teleport operations. Meanwhile, as orbits multiply and satellites are increasingly software-defined, the demands on the ground segment for capacity, flexibility and seamless integration with terrestrial networks are overwhelming legacy analog technology. As technology vendors are rethinking their entire product lines to meet the new needs, teleport operators are being confronted with the need to rethink and renew their core value proposition, and to make strategic investments without investing too far ahead of market demand. In this report, WTA invites teleport, satellite and technology decision-makers to share their forecasts for the industry, their identification of customer value and the moves they are making today to prepare for a new future.

Designing the Software-Defined Ground Segment of the Future

Long after terrestrial telecom went digital, satellite communications has clung to its analog infrastructure of waveguides, amplifiers, filters, mixers, matrix switches and so on. The technology was a good match for the static design of GEO broadcast services. Today, that infrastructure is incapable of keeping cost-effective pace with advances in space – HTS and VHTS satellites, software-defined satellites, LEO and MEO constellations – and the growing dominance of data in the traffic mix. The industry’s future depends on digital transformation, but there remains a broad gulf of opinions on how to achieve it in terms of technology, operations and capital investment. In this report, WTA consults executive of teleport operators, satellite operators and the technology vendors that will provide their solutions on the value of digital transformation and the road to its achievement.

Managing Multi-Layer Connectivity

Starlink has made headlines in the industry by offering its consumer-grade satellite broadband service for maritime, enterprise, energy and mining applications. Customer interest is high because of the drastically lower price of the service, despite the fact that only one-quarter of the Starlink constellation has been launched, and both pilot projects and commercial deployments are underway. With SES mPOWER scheduled to start service in Q1 2023 and OneWeb by the end of the year, multi-orbit networks are rapidly become a practical reality. But what has been the experience of ground-based service providers in integrating LEO and MEO in a package that meets the QOS and SLA needs of their customers? What essential technologies are making it possible and how are they operating in practice? In this report, WTA learns the answers from teleport operators and technology providers deploying commercial services on the leading edge.

Ground Segment: Just a Service?

Ground-segment-as-a-service can sound like a contradiction in terms. No one has yet invented the data system that can exchange RF with orbiting satellites on its own. Physical communications infrastructure, from antennas and HPAS to modems and digitizers, are required to close the links, not to mention the staffing, expertise and management systems to make it happen. But GSaaS is a reality, and traditional ground segment service providers risk finding themselves in the place of taxi drivers who kept driving around looking for fares while rideshare companies were giving their customers the power to book a ride on their smartphones. In this report, WTA examines the differing business models of today’s GSaaS providers, the markets they serve, and the benefits and risks of integrating a teleport’s physical and data systems with this new class of service providers.

How Green is My Teleport?

Energy is one of the largest expense items for teleport operators, as well as a major generator of greenhouse gases. This offers an opportunity to improve the bottom line while contributing to the battle to limit climate change. Effective sustainability policies and practices are more than something that “feel good” – customers increasingly demand to know what a company’s sustainability posture is, and smart practices can add measurably to facility resilience.

Excess power consumption has many causes, from old and inefficient technology to operational practices. Business practices matter, too, because travel contributes both to costs and emissions, and sources of electricity range from coal plants to solar and wind. Operators looking for savings are balancing capital investment in new systems with low-cost changes to their practices to achieve a reasonable return on investment. In this report, WTA interviews satellite and teleport operators as well as technology executives about their approaches to enhancing the sustainability of their ground facilities, reducing power consumption and reigning in business practices that generate both costs and carbon.

How to Win Business from a Telco or MNO

“It’s Alive!” How Innovation Enables Teleport Success in a Changing Video Distribution Market

Pros and Cons of the LEO Gateway Business

Growth Opportunities in Satellite-Cellular Integration

Building a Better NOC

Inside the Top Operators 2021

How to Profit from Customers’ Digital Transformation

• The status of digital transformation in the industry
• The opportunities and challenges associated with digital transformation
• Some of the benefits realized to date
• What the future might hold

Smarter Selling in a Virtual World

Service Automation and Orchestration for Teleport Operators

2021 Cloud Forecast for Teleport Operators

A 2018 study by IDG based on a survey of IT executives in developed nations showed just how far adoption of cloud computing had come:

• 77% of enterprises had at least a portion of their computing infra-structure in the cloud
• Respondents expected to spend an average of US$46.4m on cloud applications, platforms and services that year, with 30% of all IT budgets allocated to the cloud

By 2020, IDG found that 92% of enterprises had put at least a portion of their computing into the cloud, average annual investment had nearly doubled to $74 million and almost half the applications they were running were purpose-built for the cloud environment.

It was in 2018 that WTA first reported on how teleport and satellite operators were integrating the cloud into their operations and client solutions. In 2021, we take a fresh look at how teleport operators are letting cloud services transform their operations, the markets where they are finding cloud service growth and the requirements for success in a cloud-dominated environment.

Coming Out of COVID-19

COVID-19 fundamentally disrupted the entire global economy, and satellite and teleport operators were not exempt from its impact. The extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic forced technology companies and service providers to adapt in ways few could have predicted beforehand.

In this report, WTA dives into the widespread impact that COVID-19 had on satellite and teleport operators around the globe. We examine the similar and disparate ways technology companies addressed the pandemic with new policies for both internal operations and relations with new and existing customers. We also explore how these companies see the light at the end of the tunnel: what comes after COVID, and how is the industry preparing for it? In researching this report, we interviewed more than a dozen satellite and teleport operators, whose comments are not attributed by name or by company to ensure an open and robust discussion.

Mobile Interference with Satellite Operations - How Serious an Issue?

In 2020, WTA began receiving reports from teleport operators whose operations were being disrupted by interference from terrestrial mobile in C-band (newly opened for mobile use) and Ka-band ranges. The issue has the potential to become more serious as more satellite bands face pressure to be opened to mobile use. Responding to these concerns, WTA held discussions with operators and launched a survey to determine how serious the issue is today and how serious it might become in the future. The report shares WTA's preliminary conclusions from a sample of 14 teleport executives.

The Virtual Teleport

The Virtual Teleport examines the growing adoption and impact of virtualization on the teleport and satellite sector. The report explores the extent to which teleport operators have embraced virtualization, its benefits, the barriers and challenges it presents, the opportunities it creates, and what the future might hold. In researching this report, WTA solicited and received input from more than a dozen teleport industry executives and technology experts, who offered a wide range of viewpoints on the subject.

Teleports and the 5G Opportunity

For years, organizations from the 3GPP standards consortium to the European Space Agency have been working to ensure a place for satellite in the emerging 5G standard. Meanwhile, 5G has slowly emerged from potential to deployment. GSMA forecasts that 5G will account for 20% of global connections by 2025, at which time 4G subscriptions are expected to peak at 60% of mobile users worldwide.

At this juncture, WTA takes a new look at teleports and 5G, updating the early conclusions of our 2018 report with the experience of teleport and satellite operators and the technology companies that drive their innovation. We explore market trends in 4G and 5G, the technology and operational requirements for competing in 5G and how meaningful the opportunity appears to be now and in the coming year.

Inside the Top Operators (2019)

The teleport industry is not large by global standards, but it plays an outsize role in connecting the networks and applications in the sky with terrestrial suppliers and users of services. Since 2004, WTA has published its Top Teleport Operator rankings based on an annual survey of operators as well as review of financial data from publicly-traded firms. The Top Operators respondents not only provided financial data for the past two complete fiscal years but also shared information on trends in markets, pricing and services at the end of the 2019 calendar year.

New Antennas, New Opportunities

A new generation of flat panel antennas is entering commercial service, and manufacturers of more traditional antennas are responding with smaller, lighter and more nimble alternatives.  As with any new technology, they offer new advantages and disadvantages, and early adopters are exploring the trade-offs among form factor, power consumption and performance.We interview antenna manufacturers, satellite operators and teleport operators to learn what the teleport industry can expect from the flattening of the antenna world in terms of costs, operational complexity, applications and access to new markets. 

The Cybersecurity Buzzwords Every Manager Needs to Know

Like every technology field, cybersecurity is filled with buzzwords. They have vital meaning to practitioners – but they can also be a barrier to understanding for managers who have to make decisions about cybersecurity based on their knowledge of finance, sales or satellite communications.

Drawing on the expertise of cybersecurity professionals and educators, WTA offers this guide to terms you are most likely to encounter when grappling with cyberthreats and the practices and technologies that protect against them.

High-Performance: Insights that Improve Quality of Service

In today’s highly competitive markets, subject to falling capacity prices, customers are becoming more demanding rather than less. They expect to pay less but enjoy high availability and flawless execution. For this High-Performance report, we turn to WTA auditors, teleport and satellite operators for insights on the proper management of the most important contributors to high QOS and the often-overlooked issues that can take even well-managed teleports by surprise.

Finding Growth in Media Services

Since HBO, Turner and PBS put their program distribution on satellite in the 1970s, the media and entertainment business has been a major customer for satellite capacity for both distribution and contribution. Until now. On-demand streaming of video and audio content got it start in 2005. Today, it is growing at an explosive rate.

Viewing hours in the US for streaming content grew 72% from Q1 2018 to Q1 2019, according to Conviva. That growth rate itself is 50% faster than in the prior year. On a global basis, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reported that subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime surpassed cable TV for the first time in 2018.
Cable and satellite still bring in the lion’s share of subscription revenue, but cord-cutting is whittling it down year by year.

This change has had massive impact on media and entertainment companies, and on the transmission vendors that serve them. Ground-based service providers have consolidated, video fill rates for satellites have plummeted and pricing has followed. Yet there are still growth opportunities in the market for companies that have been forward-looking and agile enough to stay one step ahead of market demand. In Finding Growth in Media Markets, WTA invites their executives, and the vendors they work with, to describe the challenges they face, the opportunities they have seized, and how their companies have changed to meet the needs of the next generation of media and entertainment.

New Paths to Teleport Profitability

Times of drastic change can be tough times to maintain profitability.  With established markets and processes, skillful managers can find plenty of opportunity to develop new efficiencies and trim costs.  When services, technologies and markets are in flux, it becomes much harder to estimate costs, prioritize investment and make smart personnel decisions.  Yet the same changes also bring new opportunities to replace high-cost technologies with lower-cost ones and re-engineer operations in major ways.  We talk with technologists and operators to uncover the service, technology and market changes that present the most challenge to profitability as well as those that open new routes to higher margins. 

April 9, 2020

Budgeting for Cybersecurity

An executive with a major cybersecurity firm recently conducted an experiment via Twitter. She sent a tweet to industry decision-makers for her service and asked them the following question: “Cybersecurity budgets come in many sizes. How does your company determine yours?” Among the answers that surprised her were: “Pick a number and subtract that number from itself. That’s your budget.”

Even if you’re a bit hazy on cybersecurity, you probably agree that this is not smartest ways to plan for the costs of protection. Particularly when the average cost of a data breach to small businesses ranges from US$120,000 to $1.24 million, and the average across all businesses is $3.92 million, according to IBM’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach report.

Good planning and budgeting are needed. According to Gartner Group, worldwide IT spending is growing at 3.2% per year, while information security spending is growing at more than twice that rate or 9.4% CAGR. That’s not surprising given the financial, operational and reputational damage a successful hack can inflict and the seemingly explosive growth in people making a living at it. In this report, WTA provides benchmarks on IT and cybersecurity spending and a structured approach to establishing and justifying a budget.

High Performance: Safety & Security

Safety and security are two sides of the same coin in the management of the complex technology and operations of a teleport. Good safety processes protect the health and welfare of employees operating amid the potential dangers of high voltage, microwaves and combustibles. In addition to being the right thing to do, it reduces disruption and avoidable expenses for the business.

Good security procedures protect the business from malicious actors, whether outside or inside the business, while offering another layer of protection for the people working for the company. Employees do not always appreciate the additional tasks that good security adds to their working day, but the potential for major negative impact on the business makes it worthwhile.

LEO/MEO Constellations and the Teleport

The next eighteen months are critical ones for the first attempt since Iridium to loft a large-scale constellation of low-earth-orbit satellites that promise to transform global communications. OneWeb is leader of the pack of LEO constellations seeking to deliver low-priced, low-latency connectivity everywhere and its success could have major market impacts for GEO satellite operators and teleport operators. Already, LEO operators are in serious deal-making mode with operators of ground segment to provide the gateways they need to manage and provide access to their constellations.

At a moment when most of that impact is still to come, we seek answers from LEO constellations in development, GEO operators, teleport operators and the examples of Iridium, Globalstar and Thuraya integration into the business model of teleport operators. In LEO/MEO Constellations and the Teleport, WTA investigates the history and current status of the sector through interviews with the senior executives of large and small teleport operators, technology experts and operators of LEO, MEO and GEO fleets.