Speaking at the Chief Technology Officers (CTO) roundtable at Satellite 2015 in Washington DC, Intelsat’s Executive Vice President and CTO Thierry Guillemin, outlined his firm’s plans for the future. Guilemin explained that his company’s new fleet of Epic satellites are digitally configurable, allowing their capacity to be flexibly allocated to the area and bandwidth required by customer demand. In addition, these satellites’ capacity may be switched between uplink and downlink giving Intelsat complete flexibility in assigning bandwidth to the market.
Mr Guillemin went on to hold out the prospect that this new technology could “commoditise” GEO communications satellites, as the hardware becomes standardised, with software providing custom configurations. This means that satellites could be built for stock and then bought, configured and launched within a just a three-month period. Such a scenario would see costs fall and greatly enhance operators’ market agility.
Intelsat has a total of six Epic high throughput satellites on order with Boeing. The slightly delayed first Epic satellite, Intelsat 29e (IS-29e), has its launch now slated for January 2016.
