Satellite Broadband Gets Eutelsat, ViaSat Boost

French satellite operators Eutelsat SA and U.S.-based ViaSat want to leapfrog current and emerging generations of satellite-based broadband, and are putting money behind the effort, according to the Wall Street Journal.

To put the effort into perspective, the ViaSat satellite will have bandwidth exceeding the combined signal capacity of nearly all the two-way commercial communications satellites serving North America, ViaSat calculates. Basically, the two new satellites will offer price-per-bit performance an order of magnitude better than the advanced satellites in orbit today.

For its part, Eutelsat's one new advanced satellite will have a capacity equal to Eutelsat's entire 24-satellite existing fleet.

Each company has committed to separately build and launch a satellite with 10 to 15 times greater capacity than the most-advanced birds already in orbit. The companies say they plan to share some marketing and capital expenditures in securing wholesale customers.

Eutelsat hopes to launch its satellite in 2010, with ViaSat scheduled about a year later. In the U.S., the Internet connections are expected to cost between $49 and $79 a month.

Video Penetration Higher than We Think?

By some estimates U.S. cable video penetration is in the mid-60s, at the upper level at 70 percent. Satellite video is said to be between 25 percent and possibly 28 percent. And yet at the same time some estimates show "no provider" other than over-the-air transmissions for as many as 26 million homes, something on the order of 23 percent of U.S. households.

The numbers don't square, and there are few explanations other than false reporting by cable and satellite operators; incorrect housing statistics or much-higher-than-expected numbers of homes where consumers are buying multiple subscriptions. False reporting of those sorts of numbers is so unlikely as to be implausible. One has the impression that consumers tend not to buy both satellite and cable video service. Try and think of someone you know who does this.

One can make the argument that multichannel video subscriptions are nearly 100 percent, or as low as 75 percent. So things are better or worse than we might think. It is hard to tell which is the case.