The satellite industry has always been about helping overcome important communications challenges. When we needed more video competition to cable, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) helped bring it, creating a $100 billion industry. GPS literally helps us find our way as a nation. And satellite voice and broadband service enable global communications, helping us protect our vital national security interests.
But now we have a new set of challenges:
- How do we connect the 39 percent of rural Americans who lack broadband?
- How do we drive new competition and resiliency into our broadband markets?
- How do we solve the broadband connectivity challenge to enable people to always be connected everywhere — from cars, to planes, trains, boats — and even the most remote farms so they can take advantage of precision farming?
- How do we connect the next billion people around the globe?
- How do we ensure connectivity to our warfighters, giving them enhanced situational awareness on the battlefield?
- And how do we get ahead of the coming explosion in streaming video where, by 2020, a million minutes of video content will cross global networks every second?
Satellite will once again play an increasingly vital role in helping us overcome these essential connectivity challenges. To enable these solutions, we need to decrease the costs of data, reach places never before thought capable of connecting to the internet, and double the amount of available satellite data capacity over the next few years.
Satellite: driving the connectivity continuum
We are at an exciting moment in time, where innovative satellite technologies can help drive a connectivity continuum where consumers will be able to take advantage of high-speed broadband opportunities in places that have previously been unreachable in any other way – like planes, trains, boats, much of rural America, and even the warfighter on the battlefield.
At a time when we all believe that continued investment in broadband is vital to our U.S. competitiveness, expanding economic growth, and expanding consumer opportunity, we must make sure policymakers encourage all technologies, including satellite broadband, to make investments in satellite facilities. We must make sure there is an even playing field for all broadband technologies.
Ensuring ALL Americans can continuously connect to high-speed broadband — at home, on a plane, aboard a boat or train or on a car or bus — is Viasat’s primary mission.
