SpaceX launches satellite competing with Musk’s Starlink – 04/25/2023 – Market

Flying from São Paulo to Dubai, from Australia to the United States and from Canada to Argentina without disconnecting from the internet could soon be a reality.

The American company Viasat launches this Wednesday night (26) the ViaSat-3 Americas satellite, aimed at broadband internet via satellite. The launch takes place at the Kennedy Space Center on the east coast of Florida.

This will be the first of three self-made satellites that the company will launch in the coming months. The constellation will have near-global coverage, with the aim of connecting part of the 2.7 billion people disconnected or with poor internet connection in the world, according to the company.

The first ViaSat-3 is scheduled to be sent into a geostationary orbit in a 1-hour launch window, which opens at 8:29 pm (Brasília time). The satellite will cover the entire American continent and should start operating in the Brazilian market in the second half.

Internet via satellite is a form of connection that benefits regions far from large centers or regions with little telecommunications infrastructure. In these areas, mobile internet and fiber optics either do not exist or are of inferior quality.

In cable internet, more common in large centers, data exchange between provider and user is done by land and sea. In satellites, the connection is made through the air, with antennas and receivers, such as mobile internet and TV, but at higher frequencies. The Ka band, in which ViaSat-3 operates, comprises frequencies from 27 GHz to 40 GHz.

Leandro Gaunszer, general director of Viasat Brasil, says that one of the main advances of this new generation of satellites is the possibility of relocating the signal. This means that, if an area has an improvement in connectivity, the satellite can be concentrated in another region, with greater demand.

The artifact will succeed ViaSat-1 and ViaSat-2, launched in 2011 and 2017. The first covers only the US, while the second reaches the Equator. Together, they have a capacity of around 500 Gbps.

Now, each ViaSat-3 has a bandwidth capacity of 1 Tbps —about 1,000 Gbps—, the highest in the world in this regard. The undisclosed investment is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In Brazil, 70% of the satellite’s capacity aimed at the country will be allocated to the North and Midwest regions. Viasat, however, did not disclose the Brazilian share of the 1 Tbps of ViaSat-3 Americas.

“Most other satellites prioritize Brazil’s coastal region, which is the most populated. In our case, we focus on the region with the lowest broadband penetration,” said Gaunszer.

“It is where there is a great repressed demand and where few or almost no companies offer connectivity. There is a great difficulty in installing internet for the customer in that region”.

The company has been present in Brazil since 2018, when it signed a ten-year contract with Telebras to use part of the SGDC-1 satellite, launched a year earlier. Its capacity is 58 Gbps, around 5% of ViaSat-3, and it operates in 22,400 points in the country under the WiFi Brasil program, aimed at remote areas.

While WiFi Brasil offers access points of up to 20 Mbps, the connection via ViaSat-3 will reach up to 100 Mbps. The rate is similar to the country’s average broadband speed of 106 Mbps, according to the Speedtest Global Index.

With that speed, for example, it is possible to download a movie in FullHD in less than five minutes. At 20 Mbps, downloading the same type of file takes about 20 minutes.

“Often we think about speed, but for most services that customers use, speeds of 10, 15 Mbps are enough. We are used to 200, 500 Mbps, but half of this public that we serve today has never had a band start at home. It’s a substantial change”, said Leandro Gaunszer.

In the countryside, one of the regions most targeted by the company, fiber optic or cable connections —more stable and faster—, are present in 39% of households, compared to 64% in cities, according to a survey by Cetic.br released in 2022.

Brazilian customers who subscribe to the Viasat service from the second half of the year will not know whether they will be connected to the SGDC or to ViaSat-3. It will be allocated to one of the satellites according to its location and needs for speed and franchise size.

With the launch of the other two ViaSat-3s and the global reach of satellite internet, international flights with a stable connection will become more frequent. In addition, Viasat works with the application of the concept “always-on” (always active, in English) for mobile devices: even where there is no signal, there will be internet.

Satellite to be launched by Elon Musk’s rocket

The Viasat satellite will share the night’s spotlight with the rocket that will give you a ride into space. Interestingly, the bearer will be the Falcon Heavy, from SpaceX, a company that has its own satellite internet division, Starlink.

The launch takes place just over five years after its debut, in February 2018. At the time, the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, was seen more as a visionary of the space market than as the billionaire who does not know how to deal with a $44 billion social network.

This will be Falcon Heavy’s sixth launch since then, and the first in which the three thrusters will not be recovered, one of the company’s main draws. The cost of flights of the (expendable) type is estimated at US$ 150 million.

Unlike Viasat’s geostationary satellites, Starlink’s satellites are low-altitude. They are positioned about 550 km away and have smaller coverage, requiring thousands of units to cover the planet.

Despite the complexity of the operation, the low altitude allows the speed of data exchange between user and satellite (latency) to be lower when compared to the competitor’s service.

“There is a market for both, with pros and cons in each technology”, said Leandro Gaunszer, general director of Viasat Brasil.

Starlink has been in Brazil since last year, when Elon Musk came to Brazil to promote its launch. On the occasion, the government of former president Jair Bolsonaro and the billionaire announced a partnership for a program already in operation, the same WiFi Brasil operated by ViaSat and Telebras.

“The entry of a strong competitor like Starlink doesn’t make us perform less, it makes the market grow. From the data we have, there are more than 13 million homes in Brazil without connection, so there’s room for everyone. We don’t see any problems with the competition, as long as it follows the same rules and norms that we have to comply with”, says Gaunszer.

The journalist travels at the invitation of Viasat