NewSat's Paldao on His Ka-Band Perception

"We are not trying to be all things to all people, but certain application such as ISR are an ideal fit for Ka-band." - Diego Paldao

Milsatmagazine (MSM) asked Diego Paldao, NewSat's Senior Director-Americas on his opinion about Ka-band, the one which covers the frequencies of 26.5-40 GHz, in the middle of all the varied perception.

Paldao said that Ka-band is the next generation of satellite technology as there's some forward thinking companies like: ViaSat, a DBS distributor and TV broadcaster, owned by Swedish media conglomerate Modern Times Group; DIRECTV, an American direct broadcast satellite service provider and broadcaster based in El Segundo, California; SES, a global satellite owner and operator based in Betzdorf, Luxembourg and is listed in the Luxembourg Stock Exchange and Euronext Paris under the ticker symbol SESG; and EchoStar Corporation, a technology company that is the owner and maintainer of the satellite fleet for closely affiliated Dish Network. These companies have been promoting and leveraging Ka-band capabilities for some time already. He believes that in the very near future, Ka-band will be more mature and understood in many new sectors.

"I think we will see a higher proliferation of Ka-band terminals due to higher demand, which will help drive down costs and standardize design, just like we saw with Ku-band," he said.

NewSat is to date the largest independent provider of satellite communications/communications satellite (COMSAT) or artificial satellite stationed in space for the purpose of telecommunications in the Commonwealth of Australia, a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Newsat provides coverage to 75.5% of the Earth's surface, including their satellites, VSATs (very small aperture terminals), a two-way satellite ground station or a stabilized maritime VSAT antenna with a dish antenna that is smaller than three meters, and teleports (telecommunications port), a satellite ground station with multiple parabolic antennas (i.e., an antenna farm) that functions as a hub connecting a satellite or geocentric orbital network with a terrestrial telecommunications network.

In 1987, NewSat was founded by its CEO Adrian Ballintine and the co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States, that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services related to computing, Paul Allen, an American investor and philanthropist. The company started as a multimedia business. It survived the dotcom crash/bubble (also referred as the "Internet bubble" and the "Information Technology Bubble"), a historic speculative bubble covering roughly 1995-2000 (with a climac on March 10, 2000, with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52 in intraday trading before closing at 50048.62) during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise from growth in the Internet sector and related fields, to evolve into a fully-fledged satellite communications company. Most NewSat customers are located in Australia, the Middle East, a region that encompasses Western Asia and all of or part of Northern Africa, depending on the context; Africa is the world's second largest and second-most-populous continent, after Asia.

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