ViaSat Enrolls 285K in Internet Satellite Service; CEO Talks Costs

As the “Satellite 2013” conference gets underway this week in Washington D.C., Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) says more than 285,000 subscribers have signed up for its satellite-based Internet service, which began just over a year ago.

In a statement yesterday, ViaSat chairman and CEO Mark Dankberg said, “Our results prove that driving down the cost of bandwidth can make satellite a better choice than slower terrestrial alternatives.”

ViaSat and its Colorado-based ViaSat Services group (previously known as WildBlue) say this month marks the first anniversary of the nationwide rollout of their Exede Internet service—which followed the successful launch of the ViaSat-1 satellite in October 2011. “The market success of ViaSat-1 strengthens our commitment to delivering a series of new satellites that push the boundaries of what’s possible in satellite broadband across a broad range of market opportunities,” Dankberg said.

ViaSat says Exede Internet subscribers receive download speeds of up to 12 megabits per second (Mbps). A report issued last month by the Federal Communications Commission found that ViaSat’s Internet service actually performed 140 percent better than 12 Mbps for 90 percent of the company’s subscribers during peak use periods.

Mark Dankberg

ViaSat claims that the quality of its Internet service has been so high that about 40 percent of Exede subscribers switched from slower DSL, cable, and wireless services. Dankberg touched on many of these points when he talked with me last year at ViaSat’s Carlsbad headquarters. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation:

Xconomy: The last time we sat down like this, you gave me the analysis that went into the decision to launch the ViaSat-1 satellite. It had a lot to do with the tremendous growth of online video.

Mark Dankberg: Yeah, well, we’ve been doing data networking a long time. We knew back in 2000 that the key to high-performance satellite networking was in space. What was exciting about WildBlue at that time was that they came up with seven gigabits per second, which was a big step forward and it was at an affordable price. And we looked at that as… really the test case that was going to confirm this hypothesis, and it did.

What’s interesting is many other competitors just kind of went in other directions. They didn’t see the

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.