Satnews Daily
December 12th, 2018

NSR's Alan Crisp Offers His Perspective in 'Land Mobile Via Satellite, 6th Edition' 


NSR’s Land Mobile via Satellite, 6th Edition (LMvS6), just published, forecasts the markets to yield $18 billion in cumulative retail revenues from the SATCOM land mobile markets, and annual retail equipment revenues to quadruple from $92 million in 2017 to $376 million in 2027.

Flat panel antennas driving vehicle connectivity contribute to this rapid growth of equipment revenues, and new form factors and products hitting the market, offering an increasingly diverse range of devices, will further contribute to such growth.

While the land mobile market has traditionally been dominated by voice-based handsets, NSR found that other form factors, push-talk-talk, hotspots devices, and consumer handheld form factors will exhibit relatively higher growth as customers migrate towards more data-centric, environments. Consequently, the share of retail revenues attributed to traditional handhelds will decline from 33 percent to 1 percent over the coming decade.


Alan Crisp, Senior Analyst, NSR, based in Hong Kong.

NSR does not expect the connected vehicle segment to take off until at earliest 2021- 2022. Line of site issues with GEO-HTS remain, given buildings and trees typically seen along roads and highways. LEO-HTS solutions will need to be fully developed before connected cars have a chance to enter mass market territory, and prices for installation for SATCOM connectivity into cars, trains and buses remains high, with lower prices for electronically steered flat panel antennas expected to unlock significantly greater demand.

Analyst Comment

Alan Crisp, NSR Senior Analyst and report author, said that growth will remain modest across the traditional land mobile market; however, there is significant upside potential to connect vehicles — most notably buses, trains and cars with high speed, always on connectivity combining IoT type applications with in-vehicle hotspot internet. While cars have the greatest addressable market, connected trains and buses are a much surer bet to implement SATCOM connectivity, with a captive end-user audience, a much clearer business case, and lower price sensitivity.