Designing broadband satellites and services for an uncertain, bandwidth-intensive future

Transformations taking place among communications service providers and equipment manufacturers around the world considered extremely unlikely just two years ago, are changing everything we thought we knew about commercial space communications. Monopolistic business structures are being exchanged for opportunities to compete. Completely new market entrants are threatening, some already stealing market share. Well-established organizations are consolidating to gain global strength. Others are willingly breaking apart so to shed distractive business units and concentrate focus on increasingly valuable communications opportunities. For the first time, international communications giants are going public, validating their severance from government agency. New technologies, and just newly applied technologies, are making broadband communications ever more affordable and potentially omnipresent - globally. New communications applications are being invented at a pace unprecedented in history. New broadband communications capacity is being consumed at a rate that dwarfs the acceptance of personal computers, or anything else for that matter. Virtually all these changes are taking place among terrestrial and space communications alike.