Intelsat CEO Wajsgras Previews Deals in MEO, Land Mobility and Direct-to-Handset

Intelsat CEO Dave Wajsgras spoke during a fireside keynote on Monday during SATELLITE, detailing the company’s pivot from being a media networks capacity provider to a full-scale, end-to-end solutions provider, and previewed a number of potential deals in the works including Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO), land mobility, and direct-to-handset.

Wajsgras talked about how Intelsat, which is in its 60th year, cut its debt since coming out of Chapter 11, and refocused the business.

“When I joined in April 2022, it was still a strong culture in our company,” Wajsgras said, when asked to reflect on Intelsat’s history, including its recent comeback to its strongest financial position in a few years. “The technology had continued to advance. When I came in, we did a deeper dive on the strategy, we pivoted. And today, broadly speaking, we are operating quite well in all of our different verticals.”

On Intelsat’s pivot to an end-to-end solutions provider, he said the addressable market for bandwidth is about $12 billion to $14 billion, but the addressable market for connectivity is much broader.

“How can we broaden our offerings and expand our addressable market, grow the company and generate value right for all of our stakeholders?” Wajsgras said, recounting the decisions the company made. “We took those core competencies and we expanded on them across all of our different product offerings, all the different industries verticals that we serve.”

Wajsgras touted one of its biggest wins in the area of commercial aviation: In late 2020, Intelsat acquired Gogo Commercial Aviation, which brought in new expertise in the area of managed services. Since then, Intelsat has won contracts with American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, and others.

“That’s one of the top two growth platforms for his company, and it’s very competitive,” he said, pointing to Intelsat’s strength as a multi-orbit in-flight connectivity (IFC) provider, by working with Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) operator Eutelsat OneWeb. “In the fourth quarter of last year, we won more business through our multi-orbit offering than we did the prior three years combined with a single orbit offering.”

Later in the week, Intelsat announced an expansion of its partnership with Eutelsat Group for OneWeb LEO capacity, committing to $250 million for LEO services over the first six years, with an option for an additional $250 million.

Wajsgras said part of the strength is that Intelsat is good at understanding the end user customers.

“People who fly on planes are the ultimate customers — what they're looking for and what they need,” he said. “We work with major airlines to set up very sophisticated and structured service level agreements (SLAs). We can segment even by cabin what the pricing options and the structure of the Wi-Fi service might look like. So we think those two give us a good position to grow that business over.”

Outside of IFC, Wajsgras said Intelsat sees the most growth potential in the government business to military and civilian agencies, but also sees potential in the land mobility business in the future. Without giving many details, he previewed that Intelsat is in discussions with a “number of blue chip OEMs” around the world and has an ongoing pilot program in the land mobility space.

Wajsgras addressed Intelsat’s potential investment in a Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation and said Intelsat will be making a decision before the end of the second quarter. He hinted there could be outside investment if Intelsat moves forward with a constellation, saying there are other interested parties that may want to provide financial support.

“Over the last couple of months, we've had many conversations with senior people in the government, primarily on the military side. They are quite interested in what we are contemplating with a MEO constellation and how they could potentially be part of that equation. There are multiple different types of benefits that could come out of this: military communications, commercial communications, and some very advanced capabilities like edge processing or cloud in the sky.”

One of the more interesting moments of the fireside chat came during the question-and-answer segment, when an attendee asked if Intelsat is looking at the satellite-to-cell market.

“We've looked at it,” Wajsgras said. “The market’s substantial — $20 billion-plus over say the next five to 10 years. It's not going to kind of happen overnight on a global basis. A lot of the technology is still being developed, but it's fairly advanced.”

Wajsgras said Intelsat is close to investing with an unnamed technology company that he described as having has proven satellite-to-cell capability, with strong agreements with a number of large mobile network operators.

“We have talked with them for a little while and we're going to not only invest with them, but we're going to work on further developing a direct-to-handset [offering] using our spectrum holdings. We think that will give us a very unique position in this growing market.”

Intelsat is also looking at investing in new space companies to open up new channels to market, new customers, and new geographies, citing the company’s investment in terminal manufacturers hiSky and Greenerwave.

“Terminals are key to all of these networks,” Wajsgras said. “We're looking at having an offering of terminals that will support our strategy, everything from very low-cost, ruggedized terminals to very high-end terminals.” VS