Inmarsat to launch four new satellites

Dubai: UK satellite operator Inmarsat will be launching four more satellites beginning in the second half of this year, Martin Turner, Director of Media Business at Inmarsat, told Gulf News.

The company presently has 12 satellites orbiting the sky.

“Three satellites will cover the globe and provide Ka band, which offers higher bandwidth at faster speeds, and one L band satellite on top of Africa and Middle East,” he said.

He said the three new satellites will help Inmarsat to compete in markets which have been not opened to us.

The data is growing enormously and every month brings new HD channels. The demand for bandwidth is going up and with the ultra-HD channels “we will see more bandwidth and need for more satellites. New capacities are coming online,” Turner said.

More bandwidth means “better video quality” and at the same time, encoding standards are improving. He said the standard video codec used now is H.264 and that is going to be replaced by H.265/HEVC which was ratified in January. So users will the get the same or double the video quality at half the bandwidth.

H.265 can reduce file size by almost 50 per cent when compared to H.264.

More bandwidth

“Industry needs to cope with more data by making more bandwidth available by also making more efficient coding,” he said.

The satellite operator discussed the new upcoming Broadband Global Area Network service (BGAN) terminal - Explorer 710, set to be unveiled at this year's NAB Show in Las Vegas - which will offer higher.

“That is really a big jump in video quality in L band. So broadcasters are really excited about this because the BGAN terminal is small than the existing one. L band is part of the radio frequency spectrum that immarsat uses for these services. The terminal will be available in a month,” he said.