The GVF High Throughput Satellite Roundtable – High Throughput Ka-, Ku- and C-band Satellite Communications: On Planes, Trains, Ships,… in Cities, Villages and Living Rooms will take place at the Renaissance Downtown Hotel, Washington DC on May 21 & 22, 2013.
The event is organized by the GVF-EMP Conference Partnership, and follows the more than 20 events in the Partnership’s portfolio of Oil & Gas Communications Series Conferences and Broadband Maritime Series Conferences held in various key locations around the world. The HTS Roundtable also follows-on from the GVF’s Ka-band Roundtable held in London in December 2012.
The HTS Roundtable program is supported by principal sponsor Hughes and associate sponsors Inmarsat, Gilat Satellite Networks, and Space Systems/Loral, and will be built around a number of discussion-orientated panels. The panels—or “Roundtables”—begin with the perspective that the scale and the scope of current changes in the satellite industry cannot be over-stated.
A mere 10 years ago, a good year for the satellite communications industry was a terminal deployment total of 80,000 units worldwide. Today, in one country, one service provider is installing 30,000 terminals per month. Not surprisingly, this quantitative shift has prompted many questions. “What are the new pricing metrics?” “Have service level agreements changed fundamentally and, if so, how have they changed?” “What about reliability?” “How high is high capacity?” “New value-added resellers are entering the market; who are they (and do they know what they’re doing?)?”
Additionally, the technology of high throughput poses its own questions: “What are the relative merits of C-band, Ku-band and Ka-band?” “Is one application delivered as effectively as another?” “What about mobility?” “What are the implications for different user groups?” “And what is the truth about Ka band rain attenuation?”
David Hartshorn, Secretary General of GVF, and HTS Roundtable Chairman, pointed out in respect of these questions that, “Answers are forthcoming. These answers draw upon the recent track record of a growing list of industry leaders, including Eutelsat and Avanti in Europe, Yahsat and Arabsat in Africa and the Middle East, IPStar in Asia, and Hughes and Viasat in the Americas. Added to their experience are the innovation and short-term plans of competitors such as Inmarsat’s Global Xpress service, Intelsat’s EPIC offering, O3B’s medium-earth orbit (MEO) solution, and more than a dozen other launches. Indeed, more than half of the world’s dozens of satellite operators have either ordered or plan to order high capacity satellites and 14 million households and 50 percent of enterprise terminals are predicted to be using high capacity platforms by 2020. These answers will be further explored during two days of comprehensive discussion.”
The GVF High Throughput Roundtable will thus serve as a forum where the trends, the provider companies – and their end-user customers—as noted above, will provide insights into the fine detail of what is an exciting new chapter in satellite communications, a chapter that rewrites the way that applications are being delivered in the world today.
Paul Stahl, Managing Partner of EMP, commented that “Exploration of the high throughput satellite requirements of some customer verticals has become progressively encompassed within the focus of the GVF-EMP Conference Partnership since 2006 – as part of its oil & gas, and broadband maritime programmes. Most recently, in April this year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and forthcoming in May 2013 (one week before the GVF HTS Roundtable) in Aberdeen, UK, the Oil & Gas Communications Series covered/will cover various key topics as a number of Operator, Networks, Oil & Gas Business Strategy, Remote Operations, and Business Balance Sheet presentations and panel discussions.”
The Series Chairman, Martin Jarrold, the GVF’s Chief of International Programme Development, added “The programmes of Oil & Gas Communications Brazil 2013 and Oil & Gas Communications Europe 2013 feature(d) a mix of topics with a strong HTS-linked focus, for example:
The Global & Regional Satellite Operator View from Earth Orbit: Satellite Capacity Supply, Service Models, Solutions Delivery, and Oil & Gas Patch Capacity Demand; Satellite to the Cloud: Evolving New Commercial Oil & Gas Applications to the Satellite & Satellite-Hybrid Communications Environment; High Capacity, High Throughput: New Satellite Systems Meet Big Oil’s Big Data; Bandwidth in Ka/Ku/C/L: Is There a Clear-Cut ‘Versus’ for User Profit Margins?; Telepresence over Satellite: Scaling Technical Expertise & Maintaining Secure Lines of Communication to the Field; Digital Oilfield 21st Century: The Rise of ‘Big Data’; MegaBits per Second and Dollars per Day: Defining the Most Cost-Effective Communications Solutions for Oil & Gas.
The key themes with these topics pertain to HTS, because of the expansion of oil & gas ‘Big Data, because of the rising importance of bandwidth-hungry video-based content in the exploration & production (E&P) environment, and because of the increased industry focus on leveraging use of application software and data resource storage in ‘the Cloud’.”
The HTS Roundtable program will feature the following sessions:
- Setting the Satellite Broadband Scene—How High Is High Throughput?
- The HTS New Service Provision Paradigm
- Engineering the HTS Solution
- Deploying the HTS Application & the VARs
- Overview: What do the Users Need from HTS?
- Enterprise Roundtable: Redefining Satellite
- Broadcasters
- First responders and humanitarian organizations
- War fighters
- Wireless operators
- Civil aviation and rail interests
- Maritime operators
- Oil, gas & mining companies
- Governments
- Consumer Roundtable: The New Metrics
