ViaSat awarded a contract to Boeing to build the world's highest capacity satellite for launch in mid-2016.
ViaSat-2, which is based on ViaSat's next generation, Ka-band satellite technology and architecture, will double the bandwidth economics of ViaSat-1 while simultaneously increasing its coverage footprint by seven-fold.
Coverage for ViaSat-2 will include North America, Central America, the Caribbean, a small portion of northern South America as well as the primary aeronautical and maritime routes across the Atlantic Ocean between North America and Europe.
ViaSat said improvements to its SurfBeam networking technology will yield performance "commensurate with high-speed fiber-to-the-node networks (FTTN)."
ViaSat-2 will be based on the Boeing 702HP satellite bus.
ViaSat and Boeing also signed a strategic agreement to jointly market and sell satellites systems based on ViaSat-2 technology.
"The market success of ViaSat-1 class satellites has highlighted the magnitude of the opportunity for truly competitive satellite services," said Mark Dankberg, chairman and CEO of ViaSat. "It's clear that superior bandwidth economics in space create competitive advantages on the ground, in the air, and at sea, compared to other satellite and terrestrial alternatives. ViaSat-2 represents a significant breakthrough in broadband satellite technology – for the very first time combining extremely high bandwidth capacity with very large coverage areas. ViaSat-2 will make it possible to offer superior in-flight connectivity on applications ranging from JetBlue leisure flights to the Caribbean to U.S. government aircraft traveling to Europe or Latin America, to critical national and Homeland Security missions. ViaSat-2 will also combine unprecedented capacity and coverage with operational flexibility – solving historically intractable issues in geographical distribution of bandwidth demand, capital investments, and system performance. We believe ViaSat-2 is more than just state-of-the-art technology, it's a great investment."
- ViaSat's "Exede" Internet satellite service for North America is powered by the ViaSat-1 satellite, which iffers the highest capacity commercial satellite to date with 140 Gbps of capacity. The Exede service offers up to 12 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps with plans starting at $50 per month.
- In September 2012, Intelsat selected Boeing's 702MP platform for its first EpicNG high-performance satellite.
Scheduled for launch in 2015, Intelsat 29e will offer high-performance communications coverage spanning North and South America, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the North Atlantic aeronautical route connecting North America and Europe.
