[SatNews] NSR’s 13th edition of the VSAT and Broadband Satellite Markets report projects overall VSAT and broadband subscribers, excluding backhaul and trunking, will reach nearly 9.5 million by 2023.

This growth will be seen across fixed satellite services in traditional C-/Ku-/Ka- wide-beam and Ku-/Ka- High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity. Revenues earned from service provisioning and sales of Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) are expected to reach $8.8 billion, with more than half expected to be from North American providers. Latin America and Europe will exhibit the fastest growth, while other regions like Asia will be slower to grow due to a lack of HTS supply and lower disposable income bringing down the addressable market for consumer broadband on the basis of purchasing power.
 
“There is a shift happening in the VSAT industry on a scale never seen before,” said Prashant Butani, Senior Analyst at NSR and author for the report. “Broadband is fast becoming a universal right and Governments recognize that one of the fastest ways to make it available to a large population is a High Throughput Satellite. The consumer demand for broadband is so strong in parts of the developed world that the VSAT provider industry as a whole is changing from being a B2B, wholesale infrastructure provider to essentially a Global ISP,” states Butani.
 
HTS satellites and the lower cost per bit are the big drivers behind consumer broadband in North America and Europe, with Latin America and Eastern Europe not far behind. HTS is also expected to take a fair chunk of the growth in enterprise VSATs away from traditional wide-beam FSS satellites in C/Ku/Ka- band, but there are challenges.

“Operators are trying to answer the question about whether HTS will cannibalize Ku-band enterprise VSAT business. We believe there are issues that need to be addressed before that happens, not the least of which are truly global coverage, catering to in-country fixed and not just global mobility demand and finally, the establishment of gateways that address the concern of data leaving political boundaries,” added Butani.

There's more information regarding this report at this infopage.