MDA Corp. President and CEO Howard Lance, revealed during a second quarter 2017 earnings call, that MDA subsidiary US satellite-manufacturing company SSL, had recently completed the design of a HTS (High-Throughput Satellite) satellite with over 500 Gbps total capacity, for an undisclosed commercial operator. The company is expecting the operator to officially order the satellite “in the coming months”. SSL expects the contract to be worth circa CAD$500 million (Canadian dollars) – US$401.9 million in US dollars.
Update 11/08/2017: Hughes Network Systems (an EchoStar company) announced that they had placed an order with SSL for ECHOSTAR 24/JUPITER 3, which SSL confirmed is the 500 Gbps capacity satellite contract they were alluding to.