Executive interview
Sixty years ago, Intelsat was the founder of satellite telecommunications. Created by an act of the US Congress, it was to give life to Arthur C Clarke’ s proposition of three geostationary orbiting satellites being able to provide communications around the globe.
Its‘ breakthrough’ moment was providing the pictures for the worldwide audience of the moon landing in 1969. By the 1980s, as well as being a leading provider of telecommunications, its satellites played a pioneering role in the TV-to-cable headend business, the precursor to the Direct to Home phenomenon of the 1990s and 2000s.
The DTH and headend business is still healthy, and vital in many regions, but elsewhere the trend is solidly towards IP, and this is where Intelsat’ s Hybrid Services come in.
Intelsat: In space, on the ground
Intelsat is a name to conjure with across the years of satellite broadcast, today it remains at the cutting edge with its hybrid services.
“ We look at Hybrid as the combination of satellite and terrestrial technologies, with the satellite element including multiple orbits,” says Pascale Fromont, VP & GM Media.“ We have over two hundred thousand miles of fibre that we own and operate around the world, and this is being expanded through partnerships with other fibre providers, and we’ re adding on top of that a managed IP service that rides on the public internet; this is what we call Intelsat One IP.”
“ This Hybrid Service takes those different technologies: space, fibre and IP, and brings them together into a cohesive, orchestrated solution. This takes the traffic of the customer wherever it needs to go; to the cloud, to a teleport, to a customer premise; it is about optimising the best mix for the customer for what they care about most, which is going to be their coverage, their quality of service, their price point. On the space side, when it comes to live events, for example, Low Earth Orbit satellite provision might be the best solution for visibility or throughput – combining everything is what we are all about.”
“ In terms of an all-round managed service, a good example is our provision for Hearst EMEA. They had a number of affiliates who were just outside the footprint of their satellite capacity but it wasn’ t worth taking extra capacity to reach them, so we provided a terrestrial IP solution – and we were able to supply that mixed solution in just two months – you can read about their experience in a case study that is on our website.”
“ Intelsat was the founder of satellite telecommunications.”
“ We have over two hundred thousand miles of fibre.”
“ Managed services allow customers to concentrate on their core business. And, of course, they benefit from our scale in all these solutions. For sure, there is an overall trend towards IP, but it very much depends on the region and there is still a tipping point in terms of distribution points
“ Managed services allow customers to concentrate on their core business.”
beyond which satellite makes sense. What we bring is the seamless transition between all the different transmission technologies – the customer doesn’ t need to know what technology they are on so long as the content is delivered up to their specs.”
“ Latin America is very good example of where a hybrid approach is required. It is a vast continent with an often challenging geography, and so there are areas where fibre will never be prevalent, so satellite is very important. MVS in Mexico is a good example of a customer who used to manage their own teleports. Now we provide them an end-to-end managed service. And Carolco in Columbia do their own domestic distribution, but we provide their service into North America.”
“ Meanwhile, in Africa, the Universal Church was using the public internet to bring the signal to their satellite uplink and that just wasn’ t reliable, so we now use our Intelsat One IP solution which adds a monitoring and management layer. We now pick up their signal in South Africa and send it over our managed IP solution to the uplink and do their distribution over the continent.”
“ The managed service really can work for customers of all sizes, from big Tier Ones to those with just one or two channels – they don’ t need to maintain their own infrastructure and we do all of these things at scale for hundreds of customers and, of
“ The managed service really can work for customers of all sizes.”
course, that means we have a highly skilled and experienced workforce. And we work with customer to optimise what is their most important priority.”
“ Some of our more recent gains have been with FAST services. They are looking to be on as many platforms as possible in order to maximise their reach – and we have what we call Free To Air Neighbourhoods for Direct To Home. In the US one of these what we call Galaxy 19 with millions of homes in its’ footprint. It’ s a ready-made audience for FAST
“ It’ s a ready-made audience for FAST channels to leverage.”
channels to leverage, and we work with them on audience measurement that they can take to their clients. So, again satellite can be a good compliment to what’ s being done in streaming and that will expand their audience in a very cost-effective way.”
Executive interview
EUROMEDIA 21