How ViaSat's Exede makes satellite broadband not suck
- Tuesday, 10 January 2012 18:30
On the first open day at CES in Las Vegas, in a temporary building outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg and a team of executives and engineers were trying to do something very difficult: persuade people that broadband satellite isn't the worst idea ever. ViaSat, which bought satellite broadband provider WildBlue in 2009, has invested $400 million in a new satellite—and millions more into a network of ground stations and a terrestrial fiber network— that Dankberg believes will change the image of satellite much in the way Hyundai has changed the image of Korean cars.
A lot of that bet rides on the capacity of ViaSat-1, the satellite at the center of ViaSat's Exede broadband service (also being offered through Dish Network). Exede offers bandwidth that is better than most DSL services: 12 megabits per second down and 3 megabits per second up. That bandwidth is possible partly because of ViaSat-1, which is basically a giant bridge in the sky, providing 140 gigabits per second throughput between service users and the service's 20 terrestrial teleports distributed around the US. Each of those ground stations has gigabits of capacity, and are in turn connected to the Internet through high-capacity peering points.
