Tuesday, Jun 19, 2007 at 00:59
This is extracted from the 2006 Globa$hit Annual Report to Shareholders dated 30th March 2007.
It makes for interesting reading particularly the issues with the current generation of Sat's and the continued degradation of the system which by their own description "the quality of two-way communications
services will decline, and by some time in 2008 substantially all of our satellites launched between 1998 and 2000 will cease to be able to support two-way communications services"
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Constellation life and health. Our current satellite constellation is aging. We plan to launch our eight spare satellites in 2007. Assuming these launches are successful and we are able to mitigate the Sband anomaly described below, we expect that our current satellite constellation will provide a commercially acceptable quality of service through 2009. A number of our satellites have experienced various anomalies over time, one of which is a degradation in the performance of the solid-state power amplifiers of the S-band communications antenna. The S-band antenna provides the downlink from the satellite to a subscriber’s phone or data terminal. Degraded performance of the S-band antenna reduces the quality of two-way voice and data communication between the affected satellites and the subscriber and may reduce the duration of a call. If the S-band antenna on a satellite ceases to be commercially functional, two-way communication is impossible over that satellite, but not necessarily over the constellation as a whole. The root cause of the degradation in performance of the amplifiers is unknown, although we believe it may result from irradiation of the satellites in orbit.
The S-band antenna amplifier degradation does not affect adversely our one-way “Simplex” data transmission
services, which utilize only the L-band uplink from a subscriber’s “Simplex” terminal to the satellites.
To date, we have managed the degradation of the S-band antenna amplifiers in various technical ways, as
well as by placing into service spare satellites already in orbit and moving unimpaired satellites to key orbital positions.
Based on our most recent analysis, we now believe that, if the degradation of the S-band antenna amplifiers continues at the current rate or further accelerates, and if we are unsuccessful in developing additional technical solutions, the quality of two-way communications
services will decline, and by some time in 2008 substantially all of our satellites launched between 1998 and 2000 will cease to be able to support two-way communications
services.
FollowupID:
508613