Why India's first high-throughput satellite broadband service is a big deal

The resulting explosion of bandwidth would provide a big boost to commerce in underserved areas

The commercial launch of India’s first High-Throughput Satellite (HTS) broadband services by Hughes Communications on Monday takes the country into a new age.

Hughes has been running HTS for a while in conjunction with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). But it used to target government organisations, including village panchayats and defence installations, and also telecom service providers.

Satellite broadband covers places, which are hard or impossible to reach with fibre, or microwave towers. HTS uses technology that offers high-speed, low-latency internet beamed from satellites.

Riding three Isro geo-stationary satellites (GSAT-11, 19 and 29), the new service covers the Himalayas from Kashmir and Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. It also covers the other “sisters” of the Northeast, and the far-flung archipelagos of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep. It has already connected 5,500 village panchayats, and many army outposts and other defence installations.  

In addition, HTS provides “backhaul” (bandwidth connecting a cell tower to the main network) to the cellular networks of telecom service providers, which immensely improves speed and reduces latency for 4G services in difficult locations. Hopefully, it will provide similar backhaul services for 5G networks, once those roll out.

The new commercial services will target micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and SMEs in places where broadband was earlier impossible to provide. Hughes is looking at offering reasonably priced tariff packages to connect bank branches, cybercafés, commodity traders, etc. The commercial launch is enabled by new policy, which allows the use of shared infrastructure gateways and cuts charges payable to the government.

Initially, HTS services will offer speeds of between 2 and 10 Mbps.

The current services use Ku-band transponders, which is the common standard (but not mandatory in engineering terms). Hughes intends to ramp up further by getting bandwidth on SpaceX Starlink’s LEO (low-Earth orbit) or MEO (medium-Earth orbit) satellites in the next phase, as well as continuing the partnership with Isro – or rather with NSIL (NewSpace India Ltd, which is Isro’s commercial arm). Isro says it’s developing more flexible software-driven designs for its next generation of satellites.

The key to HTS is “spot beam” technology. A spot beam is provided by a high-gain antenna beaming out a strong, narrow-focus signal across a “spot” of a few hundred square kilometres. This is picked up by Earth stations within the “spot”. In earlier standards, weaker, less focused signals used to be broadcast to several thousand square kms – this is what is used to offer TV channels, for instance.

The big deal: spot beams can use the same frequency to carry different data to many different spots. This is a multiplier, since the same frequency can now carry much more data – easily 10x or 20x the earlier standards.

In effect Hughes says it can now transmit (and hence, sell) as much data per annum as it did in aggregate across the last 27 years of India operations. This allows it to reduce tariffs to fractions of earlier levels.

Hughes (the local outfit Hughes Communications has a joint venture with Airtel) has been providing HTS services across the world for years, and Hughes’ Jupiter VSAT system holds dominant global market share. (Jupiter is also used for non-spot-beam technology.) This means most of the technological details and the necessary adaptations for Indian networks have been ironed out quite easily.

There will soon be competition in this space. Amazon, SpaceX (through its Satcom division Starlink), Airtel OneWeb, etc. are all looking at this market. The technological choices will be intriguing for satcom service providers since there are pros and cons to different types of satellites.

LEO and MEO satellite orbits are close to the Earth (600-1,000 km for LEO, and 5,000-20,000 km for MEO) compared to GSAT (around 38,000 km). This means lower-latency signals. But a geostationary satellite synchronises its orbit to stay above a fixed point with respect to the Earth’s surface and that’s a big advantage in providing services to fixed spots (each spot is several hundred square km if you recall).

LEO / MEO are not geostationary. This makes it possible to use LEO/ MEO constellations to provide broadband connectivity to moving ships in mid-ocean, and to aircraft. But it also means clever juggling to provide seamless connectivity from a moving object to a fast-moving object.

Isro’s promise of designing more flexible satellites, which change frequencies, shift antennae direction around, etc., would surely lead to more innovation as well. Assuming tariffs are reasonable, individual subscribers should also be able to use VSAT-based broadband services. The resulting explosion of bandwidth should provide a big boost to commerce in hitherto underserved areas.