ViaSat-2 Launch Will Mean Faster Satellite Internet

Stuck with wearisome, expensive satellite internet? Faster speeds are on the way, cheers to ViaSat-ii, a satellite that launched into orbit on Th.

Connected Traveler ViaSat-2 will heave the capacity bachelor to ViaSat's Exede consumer satellite internet service, as well as its airline and regime customers. Information technology will take several months for the new satellite to reach its intended orbital path and consummate diagnostic tests, so Exede hasn't announced whatsoever new data plans yet. But ViaSat estimates that once ViaSat-2 goes online at the end of the year, it will be able to provide every bit much as 100Mbps download chapters to people's homes.

To put that in perspective, Exede's current plans top out at 25Mbps, but only in certain areas. They likewise have painfully low data caps: the $150-per-calendar month plan, for instance, limits y'all to 30GB per month. ViaSat reported that it had approximately 659,000 residential subscribers at the shut of its 2022 fiscal twelvemonth. That's a tiny number when compared with major broadband providers like Comcast, but many of Exede's customers live in rural areas that aren't served by whatever other ground-based internet service providers.

One of Exede'south chief competitors, HughesNet, recently launched its own higher-capacity satellite, called Echostar XIX. HughesNet plans also pinnacle out at 25Mbps, although the increased capacity means information technology has quadrupled data caps.

Since ViaSat-2 will expand the company's service expanse to parts of Central and Southward America, it is also experimenting with bringing satellite internet to a single admission signal in pocket-size villages, and so distributing it to people'southward devices via Wi-Fi.

"Many villages within our trial plan take no, or minimal access to fixed broadband internet services. Our trial work has shown that we can service thousands of villages-at-scale," Kevin Cohen, ViaSat's General Managing director of United mexican states Consumer Services, said in a statement.

Some airline passengers volition also see speed increases for in-flight Wi-Fi. American Airlines is switching to ViaSat for future Wi-Fi installations after lamenting the low speeds of its electric current Gogo network, which connects to prison cell towers on the footing. And JetBlue recently finished installing ViaSat internet on its entire fleet. JetBlue's service, which is free, promises up to 20Mbps for each passenger on the plane, which is enough bandwidth to stream online videos in high definition.