LeoSat Picks Up Where the Others Leave Off

LeoSat, which plans to launch a new constellation of 80 or more low earth orbit satellites to provide high-throughput Internet access covering every square inch of the earth, thinks its wholesale business model and high bandwidth makes it a potential partner for virtually every other satellite capacity supplier or retailer, aside from the core markets it has identified.

For starters, LeoSat is focusing exclusively on wholesale capacity for business customers, not the consumer business and not business segment retail.

“We wouldn’t compete with anybody in the current milieu,” says Fotheringham. “Our lowest service tier begins where traditional satellite ends.”

The lowest tier of service offers 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps of Internet connectivity. The middle range offers 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps while the top tier supports 500 Mbps up to 1.2 Gbps.

“We do what they cannot,” Fotheringham says of the comparison with legacy satellite services. So he believes LeoSat will have “many chances to align with incumbents who are delivery partners.”

Strictly focused on business-to-business customers, LeoSat’s primary focus will be delivering “ industrial-grade communications to major organizations,” both commercial and government, says Fotheringham.

In fact, even early on, when its first satellites are launched, LeoSat sees “some very interesting opportunities for early-entry strategies, where with a single plane you can get 24/7 coverage in the high and low latitudes, where we find big gaps in infrastructure with not a whole lot of people but very high-value people with high-value requirements.”

One shorthand description might be that LeoSat sees its target market as the biggest 3,000 companies in the world. The segments of those customer requirements that make the most sense are mission-critical and high bandwidth Internet communications in locations where such bandwidth is hard to secure.

That logically could include exploration, scientific or extraction operations. LeoSat would offer lots of bandwidth to users from big firms that have high requirements, in places where capacity is sorely lacking, and high ability to pay for quality connections.