Keep your rocket science simple – and your satellites on schedule

The news reported on Satlaunch 19 October that Inmarsat’s GX satellites, the I-5s could be delayed until late 2013 could prove an embarrassing knock to the GX programme, if hardly fatal. No source is cited for the news and no explanation for the delay but this will doubtless give more succour to the small but vociferous minority that think that launching a fully-funded next-generation satellite constellation is somehow a sign of strategic weakness.

In the meantime, players from within the maritime communications industry continue to insist to me that the overly-simplistic Ka-bad/Ku-good argument fails to address the key issues for maritime users – something Intelsat appears to agree with, by the way.

Some of these insiders – including the hardware makers and service suppliers are already serving both markets and have contracts for Ku-Band VSAT and FleetBroadband and are looking for a piece of the action on GX.

The complex realities of the satcoms market were similarly apparent to the analysts at the Inmarsat Investor Day, though some of the questions revealed that comparing apples to oranges can’t get you a useful comparison.

One of these misconceptions is that VSAT terminals are really quite small and as even Jim Dodez can tell you, they are actually pretty big – especially if you want them to work as described. That will mean a big Inmarsat antenna for GX and a regular-sized one for a FBB back-up.

The fact is that, while none of the analysts appeared to have bitten on the opportunity to ask Inmarsat five long-winded questions about GX, they were content to look at subscriber growth, revenues, cash flow and leverage as the basis for company’s more forward looking statements.

It is entirely true that GX takes Inmarsat out of its L-Band comfort zone to go head to head with the FSS providers that have moved into maritime over the last few years. It’s easy to see why that would annoy the VSAT players.

What doesn’t seem to have occurred to its competitors is that Inmarsat’s buying ShipEquip was simply a means to an end and not an end in itself. Inmarsat’s current VSAT penetration is pretty small in practice but the free upgrade to the global, managed GX platform on essentially the same system, working with only three ground stations suddenly makes it much more attractive.

Any VSAT provider who buys capacity and stitches it together can be accused of providing an inelegant system but if it does what it says on the tin, that matters less. What Inmarsat’s long-term partners seem to want from GX is the same kind of simplicity that mark out its E&E L-Band products from the VSAT competition.

Sources say that Inmarsat should strive to retain the elegance of the L-Band network solution and not put too much technology in between the satellites and the users. The service enablement platform that Cisco will build for GX is one such risk. As one satcoms veteran told me:

“Frank Coles can suggest that KVH is a hardware provider not a satcoms provider but by the same token Inmarsat has never operated in the applications layer. They need to ensure that the system they are developing doesn’t get too complicated. I’m not sure that shopping and games is part of their core competence.”

The Cisco solution may not finally include the Apple App Store-like functionality but Inmarsat clearly hopes to put middleware such as email, comms control, anti-virus and similar value-adds on there but, if so it will be taking another bite out of its partners’ business.

That may be more bad news for its formerly loyal and long-suffering DPs and VARs and it seems a highly risky move. Astrium’s Vizada, MTN, NSSL and others have their own interests in this space and it’s hard to see them surrendering without a fight and easier to see them doing their own thing.

But it further reinforces the feeling that Inmarsat is planning to launch and deliver GX with a new set of DPs. The long term relationships it has forged with specialist L-Band providers in maritime appear to be expendable.

The positive take on this is that VSAT remains a foreign country in mainstream maritime terms. The skillset in selling and installing VSAT is very different to that of Inmarsat’s traditional L-Band partners – and there has been only small crossover to date. That difference in mindset has driven VSAT penetration in oil and gas but not commercial marine in large numbers. It has grown in the last few years and is expected to continue growing but a Floating LNG platform is not a Handysize bulk carrier and never will be.

The XpressLink contracts announced to date have all been direct sales so perhaps we are really seeing the end of one era as another one dawns. But Inmarsat will have to rally some concerted support within its distribution partners to move its target of 1,000 vessels to ShipEquip and it will need real traction with who to do it.

The ability to recruit a partner with some major internal interests in VSAT will not be the end of the story – the greatest value in these contracts lies not in hardware or the airtime per se, but rather it sits in the services associated with VSAT that the partner will likely be reluctant to share – and Inmarsat in turn believes it can deliver in partnership with Cisco.

The likely scale of that partner means they will probably have competing services of their own, so Chinese walls or at least compartmentalisation will be necessary.

Viewed from this perspective, Inmarsat GX looks more like a Gordian Knot than a bag of spanners but plenty of out-of-the-box thinking is still needed.