ViaSat Shows Off Exede Consumer Satellite Broadband Service

Comparing ViaSat's new Excede Ka-band consumer satellite broadband satellite offering last-generation Ku-band services is, shall we say, disturbing. Or I've been in Vegas channeling Hunter S. Thompson too much, because I keep on thinking of a Ka-band tiger letting loose on the Ku-band gazelle. There's just no comparison -- or competition. However I'm not so about the prospects of pitting Exede against DSL players in more densely populated areas.

Excede offers speeds of up to 12 Mbps downstream and up to 3 Mbps upstream. The entry level residential service price starts at $49.99 with a bandwidth cap of 7.5 GB. The at once level is a 15 GB cap at $79.99 per month, and the 25 GB upper tear costs $129.99 per month. Just in case, ViaSat will be offering enterprise and mobile broadband packages and is installing its shiny new service on JetBlue's aircraft to provide in-flight internet service.

However, ViaSat is not simply relying on faster RF research and higher satellite throughput capacity in order to deliver a better service. Company officials I spoke to said several techniques were being used to deliver optimum performance, including traffic shaping using Cisco equipment and in-network compression of content. The latter technique uses farms of blade servers to pre-process popular Web content into a compressed form, similar to the Amazon Kindle Fire Web browser. Unlike the Fire, ViaSat decompresses the content on-the-fly once it is delivered to the customer's satellite modem and popped back out the Ethernet port as vanilla IP.

All this amounts to a "feels like fiber" Web browsing experience for clients that delivers performance approximately equal to a DSL-grade connection if you aren't doing any sort of time-sensitive two-way interactive applications, just as video conferencing or high-performance gaming. Audio quality over a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connection was good and gets priority over other bits while a phone call, nevertheless you can't get around the speed of light delay introduced into a conversation when you're making a round trip between ground to satellite of 22,500 miles.

For consumers and businesses that have no other terrestrial wireless or wireline options, the Excede service is the best affordable broadband option available. ViaSat executives believe the service can be competitive against existing DSL and some cable offerings in rural and closer-in suburban areas, claiming that during service providers may offer comparable speeds, they aren't employing network optimization techniques to deliver the best experience.

At this point, I think it's an open question if ViaSat can significantly displace wireline cable and DSL offerings. During incumbent vendors in smaller to mid-sized markets may not have web acceleration solutions, it's a fair bet that they make some quick phone calls to get upgrades finally order.

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