Home / About us / VSAT Market

VSAT Market

The need of more bandwidth is dramatically increasing on land as well as at sea. C2SATs new generation of 4-Axes Stabilised Antenna System provides marine vessels in motion with on-line two-way satellite broadband communication making it possible to offer high speed connectivity via satellite to a larger market.

Based on various market reports (Comsys Maritime VSAT, Northern Sky Research and SIA) C2SAT assesses that the VSAT market will experience a dramatic growth in the forthcoming years, since the demand for the transfer of digital information to vessels at sea is increasing. Maritime vessels have become remote corporate locations and the owners want them to have the same modern satellite broadband communication as land-based offices. Military customers will also be increasingly interested in high transmission capacity to marine offshore units.

A prominent growth driver is also the ongoing shift away from Inmarsat, still the industry standard, in favor of VSAT. There is also an expanding VSAT replacement market, based on a life span of 5 years for a typical VSAT, with 2011 being the first year the replacement market has a significant impact on overall demand, with replacements representing close to 20% of the total demand for VSAT.

Market trends to consider

Price erosion
Standardised products
Services and solutions instead of hardware
Smaller antennas
Service & Installation
Shorter leadtimes
Replacement market


VSAT statistics & forecast

Year Market demand

New Installs

Replacements
2006 430 329 101
2007 742 605 137
2008 1 286 1 144 142
2009 1 707 1 577 130
2010 1 742 1 600 142
2011 1 629 1 499 130
2012 1 915 1 501 414
2013 2 460 1 588 872
2014 3 217 1 967 1 250


Source: Comsys 2nd Maritime VSAT Report 2010

Geographic distribution

Installed VSAT per region

Region Percent
Europe 60
North America 21
Asia Pacific 11
South America  5
Africa  2
Middle East  1

 
Source: Comsys 2nd Maritime VSAT Report 2010


Service providers

C2SAT distributes its products via a global network of system integrators and service providers. Typically, the shipowner will buy a "bundled communication package" from a system integrator or telecom operator, in which the VSAT antenna is included.
At current there are about 80 system integrators, or telecom operators, who offers maritime communication solutions based on VSAT technology in the market.

The 10 largest operators control about 70% of the market. The most important, to date, are Vizada (17,6%), Ship Equip (11%) and MTN (7,5%).  


Addressable Market Summary

There is an addressable market of about 35 000 vessels. The circle below shows the potentail adressable segmants. (Current VSAT penetration today only approx 19 %)

Adressable market     


Source: Comsys 2nd Edition Maritime VSAT Report 2010