Archive for the ‘ViaSat’ Category
ViaSat, Inc. VSAT – Financial and Strategic Analysis Review
ViaSat Inc. is principally engaged in manufacturing satellite and digital communication products for enhancing the communication process at various locations. In addition, it also offers wireless communications and networking systems to government and commercial customers for tactical data links, signal processing and generation, secure networking and satellite communications applications. Additionally, it also provides software besides networking hardware to satellite or communications service providers. The company has classified its business operations under three reportable segments namely, Commercial networks, Government systems and Satellite services.
This comprehensive SWOT profile of ViaSat, Inc. provides you an in-depth strategic analysis of the companys businesses and operations. The profile has been compiled to bring to you a clear and an unbiased view of the companys key strengths and weaknesses and the potential opportunities and threats. The profile helps you formulate strategies that augment your business by enabling you to understand your partners, customers and competitors better.
This company report forms part of the Profile on Demand service, covering over 50,000 of the worlds leading companies. Once purchased, the highly qualified team of company analysts will comprehensively research and author a full financial and strategic analysis of ViaSat, Inc. including a detailed SWOT analysis, and deliver this direct to you in pdf format within two business days. excluding weekends.
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ViaSat gives war effort a boost
Airplanes passing silently over enemy territory in Iraq and Afghanistan record and transmit videos in real time back to intelligence experts in the United States with the help of Carlsbad satellite communications company ViaSat.
Because those videos help inform military decisions, picture quality is extremely important, said Larry Taylor, the head of Government Satellite Communications Systems at the company.
To boost the resolution and speed of these videos, ViaSat recently doubled the data rate its equipment can transmit, from 512 to 1024 kilobytes. This upgrade was made at the request of the Department of Defense, one of the company’s biggest customers, Taylor said.
The company also recently improved military planes’ ability to send data back to the ground.
“Traditionally when we think of Internet access, we think about a simple mouse-click to load a complex Web page, which is a lot of data going out to a remote facility, but very little coming back,” Taylor said. “But with the Department of Defense, they are actually creating the data as videos or other intelligence information collected on an airplane, and that information has to be relayed to analysis centers on the ground.”
Giving an airplane a wireless connection is like hitting a moving target, because the plane’s antennas are never in the same place. ViaSat accomplishes this task with a network of 13 hubs on the ground connected to 13 satellites, which create a “worldwide footprint” of wireless connection, Taylor said.
Boosting the planes’ data speed will allow them to send videos with higher resolution and more frames per second, both of which are important for military intelligence activities, Taylor said. Greater resolution means the video’s screen can be enlarged without creating a pixilated, or blurry, image, and increasing a video’s frames makes it smoother.
Although ViaSat originally only supplied its satellite connection technology to commercial vehicles, including business jets and trains, the Department of Defense asked the company to adapt its technology to military airplanes.
ViaSat’s satellite antenna and software are installed in more than 100 military aircraft and more than 100 business aircraft, Taylor said. The company is also expanding its reach into boats, and plans to have software in more than 750 maritime craft soon.
The average cost to equip military planes with the antenna and software to transmit videos is about $350,000, and ViaSat also has government contracts to work on upgrading the planes, he said. The company brings in about $50 million a year between its commercial and military customers, but Taylor said that number is expected to grow.
The company’s data rate from the air to the ground is also expected to grow to 2 megabytes “and beyond,” he said. It plans to transition to higher frequency bands and launch a new satellite next year.
ViaSat Demonstrates High-Speed Data Link for ISR Images at Empire Challenge 2010
ViaSat Inc., in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research and Naval Research Laboratory, demonstrated the Tactical Reachback Extended Communications (TREC) data link during Empire Challenge 2010, hosted by the U.S. Joint Forces Command. The TREC system transmitted real-time, high-resolution infrared image data from an aircraft to a ground analysis center at information rates up to 133 Mbps. In initial testing, a small, automatic pointing antenna developed by Ball Aerospace Corporation and a ViaSat one-watt RF transceiver provided repeatable, reliable transmission at 112 Mbps out to a 53 nautical mile range from an altitude of 16,000 feet.
Two important aspects of the TREC data link are the use of the 37.0 to 38.4 GHz frequency band and the implementation of the power- and bandwidth-efficient DVB-S2 waveform in the ViaSat HI-BEAM modem. Spectrum congestion has become a growing operational challenge with the increase in number of UAVs in the battlefield, but the use of this lightly-used frequency band overcomes that problem.
The ViaSat HI-BEAM DVB-S2 modems increase throughput to an information data rate up to 180 Mbps by using more advanced forward error correction – in this case Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes – in a small form factor package (2 lbs) with 17-watt power consumption. A new version of the modem, which is expected to be available in December, is designed to enable the link to provide a maximum information data rate of 720 Mbps. The system also includes a low data rate ground-to-aircraft link to provide RF power control and reduce DC power consumption.
“ViaSat power- and bandwidth-efficient communication technology is meeting the Navy’s need for a small, lightweight, low-power, high-speed UAVtoground data link,” said Russell Fuerst, VP and general manager for IP and ASICs at ViaSat. “As demonstrated during Empire Challenge 2010, this technology helps the Navy to meet its high throughput ISR goals for Tier II and III UAVs.”
The demonstration took place from August 2-13 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The annual demonstration of joint and coalition intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance is sponsored by the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.