Viasat's Latest Satellite Gears Up For Military Applications
Zacks Investment Research | Mar 12, 2018 11:50PM ET
Viasat Inc. (NASDAQ:VSAT) is offering its satellite communications service based on ViaSat-2 — the world’s most advanced communications satellite — for government, defense and military applications. The service also includes innovative ground networking technologies, with significant performance advantages over any other commercial or U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) SATCOM system.
Earlier this month, Viasat conducted a ViaSat-2 SATCOM system demonstration for the U.S. armed forces, where the satellite system demonstrated the industry's fastest broadband connections, exceeding 100 Mbps.
Emerging U.S. government needs call for bandwidth-intensive, cloud-connected military applications and the innovations in the new ViaSat-2 satellite and network can dramatically improve operational capabilities for military missions, ensuring superior reach, promptness, and resiliency for global military forces.
ViaSat-2 is a $625-million high-capacity satellite launched by the company in June 2017. Viasat’s latest satcom network is powered with greater bandwidth and higher resilience, redundancy and active cyber protection. This will maximize operational performance in the conflicted environments that military operations face during combat.
ViaSat-2 is expected to have twice the bandwidth and seven times more broadband coverage over ViaSat-1. Some other features which make it more powerful than ViaSat-1 include high-capacity connectivity, smaller gateway antenna and twice as many gateways.
Viasat is already building its next-generation high-capacity satellite system — ViaSat-3 — which is likely to expand its network worldwide.
The satellite business is a burgeoning space and is one of the fastest growing segments of the $350-billion space industry. Significant demand for higher speeds of broadband connectivity in residential, in-flight and government markets are likely to boost Viasat’s momentum in the near term. Viasat’s shares have returned 23.2% in the past six months, outperforming the Zacks Investment Research
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