comsys

The

VSAT Report

10th edition

Version 2.2s

Profile & Summary

This report has been prepared subject to the condition that it shall not,

by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the prior written consent of Communication Systems Limited. No part of this report may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

written permission of Communication Systems Limited.

Permission is granted to utilise the information in this report for the purposes of analyst research reports on iDirect Technologies and the VSAT Industry with the express permission of iDirect Technologies.

Simon Bull, Senior Consultant Communication Systems Limited

42 Holywell Hill St Albans, Herts, AL1 1BX, England

Telephone: +44-1727-832288 Facsimile: +44-1727-810194 Email: simon@comsys.co.uk Web: www.comsys.co.uk

© Communication Systems Limited, 2007

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1. Summary iDirect has managed to break through the established order of the industry over the past five years through a combination of technology innovation, entrepreneurial acumen, business strategy and focus on marketing and sales. iDirect grew its revenues about 30 per cent between 2005 and 2006 and, at the same time, increased its all-important market share from five per cent to almost ten per cent, up from effectively nothing in 2002. The latest COMSYS VSAT research found that iDirect increased its global market share of total enterprise TDMA satellite hubs to 47 per cent in 2006. iDirect also emerged as the second largest company in enterprise TDMA hardware revenue and recorded the fastest growth in enterprise terminals shipped in 2006, increasing by almost 50 per cent over 2005 and growing to nearly 10 percent of the overall market. The company's cost effective and innovative hub solutions coupled with high levels of functionality and ease of use has made it almost a de facto standard within many of the most valuable vertical markets. The last two years have seen the company expand its business into Asia and Latin America - two regions which it had barely managed to touch prior to 2005. The additional resources it has been able to deploy based on its success, have helped consolidate its position in the market and cement its strong position in its original core customer base - the small integrator, IT systems houses and entrepreneurs - all of whom see the company's platform as the key to be able to grow a valuable service business with limited capital expenditures yet with few barriers or penalties to scaling up if the business grows. At the same time, step-by-step, iDirect has added major carriers to its already impressive list of customers - Telefonica, Verizon, SingTel and Cable & Wireless have joined the likes of BT, France Telecom and Orange, while many specialised VSAT service providers, such as Schlumberger, Stratos, Telenor, GS Telecom and CapRock also make extensive use of the system. The company has also been very active in bringing new products and capabilities to its customers, but more importantly it has established a reputation as a highly supportive vendor. The report card is straight-As.

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2. Market Statistics

2.1. Data Sources & Methodology The information in this Executive Briefing was compiled from the latest 10th Edition of the COMSYS VSAT Report, unless expressly indicated. Apart from information and product data already held in our library, direct contact was made with almost all of the organisations in the report to gather up-to-date information. Visits have been made to a large number of existing and potential suppliers and service providers in Europe, Asia/Pacific, Latin America and North America. COMSYS maintains extensive databases on both the interactive star and mesh DAMA VSAT markets and tracks a wide variety of information for all individual networks. These databases form the basis of most of the statistical analysis in this report.

2.2. iDirect Achieves 47 per cent of Total TDMA Hub Sales

As part of a further analysis of the enterprise VSAT market, iDirect commissioned COMSYS to analyse sales of enterprise TDMA hubs by vendor. Hub flexibility is something at which iDirect excels, offering a far greater range of products than any other vendor and enabling an operator to build an infrastructure for a particular network or to customise an existing shared hub, extending service to other regions and satellites through the iNFINITI’s VNO capabilities (this is described in greater detail below). The sheer amount of options open to a network operator has ensured that iDirect leads the market in terms of the outright number of hubs it sells ranging in price from a few tens of thousands of dollars to millions. Both the number of hubs and the company’s total share of the market has grown steadily over the past five years and, in 2006, iDirect accounted for just under half of new hubs sold into the enterprise TDMA VSAT market.

iDirect46.9%

Gilat12.9%

Others5.9%

DVB-RCS6.6%

ViaSat13.1%

Hughes14.6%

Figure 1 - Vendor Enterprise VSAT Hub Shipments, World Market Share 2006

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2.3. iDirect Now Second Largest Provider by TDMA Hardware Revenue The following analysis considers star enterprise TDMA systems and all figures are in millions of US Dollars. Again it was iDirect which continued its dramatic growth which has also added significantly to the size of the overall market. Whilst its terminal sales have been good, it has been hub and related expansion equipment sales that have driven the company’s revenue line.

Figure 2 - Enterprise TDMA Revenues by

Vendor, 98-06 Figure 3 - Enterprise TDMA Market Share

Revenues by Vendor, 98-06 As the market has become more competitive, both in terms of service pricing and the different offers available, operators have long needed an alternative to SCPC which can support similar data rates and yet which is of similar or lower terminal cost. The need is for greater value in the service product they sell and most believe that the iDirect platform holds the answer with its integrated support for various TCP/IP enhancements as well as carrier-type data networking features, especially QoS and CIR. We have heard from several of iDirect’s customers who are basing some highly sophisticated application suites on the system with examples ranging from support of corporate Wi-Fi extension networks at remote or temporary sites, to video surveillance for security or remote diagnostics. Operators who have purchased the INFINITI system have informed us that they have done so because it offers them a highly flexible and functional platform, yet does not require them to make a huge investment in a hub system. However, operators like BT, Schlumberger, CapRock, Loral Skynet, Stratos and GS Telecom with whom we have talked, inform us that it is the feature set which iDirect’s product supports as much as the low entry cost which has driven their decision to purchase the platform.

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2.4. iDirect Increases Terminal Shipments by 50 per cent In 2006, iDirect accounted for almost 10 per cent of the enterprise market shipments, outselling DVB-RCS systems by three to one. Its combination of flexibility of platform, richness of IP features, continuous development, market strategy and professional and pervasive sales and marketing has maintained the company's momentum and taken it from am also-ran to the fourth largest supplier in the market. Figure 4 gives our traditional measure of market share by orders.

Figure 4 - Vendor Enterprise VSAT Orders, World Market Share 2005 and 2006 In our last report, we raised the issue of just how much future pure mesh systems have in the market and we continue to pose this question. The market opportunity that iDirect and other vendors now see is better described as comprising of multi-gateway networks and mesh sub-networks within a star. By 2002 we had already witnessed the meeting of the TDMA DAMA products with the star TDM/TDMA systems. Over the years, many operators had little choice but to adopt one of the high rate TDMA meshed systems, but several had begun questioning whether the high price paid for mesh capability is saleable, or indeed, required. iDirect managed to fill this gap with a system which is both very scaleable and highly capable – and which finally integrated limited mesh capability in 2006. It led the charge with its product now capable of supporting transmit rates up to 8 Mbps and carrying a host of IP, QoS and routing features and the company’s platform quickly became an alternative for many carriers which had been considering a TDMA mesh system as a replacement or enhancement of their SCPC business. With terminal costs now under $1,500 and an entry hub investment of between $150,000 and $350,000, it is easy to see why several specialised operators decided that iDirect was a natural choice.

iDirect6.8%

Others8.0%

DVB-RCS3.9%

ViaSat14.8%

Hughes42.9%

Gilat23.7%

iDirect9.7%

Gilat22.0%

Hughes43.8%

ViaSat11.7%

DVB-RCS3.1%

Others9.8%

2005 2006

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3. The iDirect Platform

Bandwidth Efficiency: iDirect’s initial design of its VSAT platform focused on bandwidth efficiency and it consequently developed an IP-based system with its own proprietary outbound and inbound TDM/TDMA access scheme. The system uses an inbound access scheme known as Deterministic Multi-Frequency TDMA which, unlike most conventional TDMA systems, does not make use of contention. Because the platform was designed to support enterprise IP services, its approach is to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth continuously to each remote station. This allocation is then dynamically changed several times a second depending on the queue depth, the CIR configuration, the QoS and prioritisation settings and the rate limiting at each remote. This allows the system to both react quickly to changing traffic demands within the network as well as provide CIR and EIR service levels.

Flexibility: The company also emphasises the ability of its inbound and outbound channels to be lit up anywhere across five different transponders and five different satellites, allowing an operator to grow its capacity when it needs it with whatever bandwidth is available and in different frequencies if its business demands it. By contrast a DVB-based system requires contiguous bandwidth and needs to grow in this fashion as well, thus demanding premium service from a spacecraft operator. This allows the possibility of a cost effective private hub, especially given the fact that the hub equipment uses the latest generation technology which is in use or being introduced by several other vendors, which uses a fraction of the rack space that older generations require.

VNO Model: The iDirect platform can also support what iDirect refers to as a "Virtual Network". A Virtual Network Operator (VNO) literally buys the capacity of a channel card in the hub chassis of a Host Network Operator (HNO). This allows VNOs to offer highly competitive broadband IP service, without a significant upfront investment. This capability illustrates why iDirect’s system has been so well received – it is not simply, as some think – the fact that the iNFINITI system offers a low cost hub. An operator is able to start a service and select from a range of hub products, unmatched by any other vendor, able to cost effectively support independent networks of between 15 and several thousand sites. The additional VNO capability can be employed either as an expansion option – many operators extend their service to different satellites uplinked from a different continent this way – or as a standalone business model in its own right. Expansion onto other satellites, different frequencies or simply another transponder is possible by adding another two cards (one each for inbound and outbound carriers) into the 5IF chassis although it is not unusual for an operator to simply buy another 5IF chassis for an important customer.

Group QoS – Advanced Bandwidth Allocation: Group QoS (GQoS) is one innovation which iDirect particularly highlights. This is a complex tool for an iDirect network operator that, in essence, allows traffic types to be prioritised, based on a variety of different parameters, within the allocated bandwidth. Network QoS (NQoS) is also considered important. The company holds that competing VSAT systems only prioritise voice bits over data bits as they are transmitted by a remote terminal whereas the iDirect system can specifically siphon off data capacity from one remote to feed voice capacity requirements at a completely different remote. The iNFINITI platform also incorporates a range of additional TCP/IP support capabilities which essentially incorporate all of the features of a high end router. These include RIPv2 and Static Routes, IGMPv2 IP multicast, DHCP/NAT, TCP acceleration in both directions, 3-way handshake acceleration and local DNS caching. These are all features which a network operator would have to add in the form of a separate unit to some other systems.

Integration with Terrestrial Carriers: A major area of development for the company has come as a result of its growing carrier customer base. The likes of Verizon, BT and Orange all have core business strategies focused on the deployment of large, extensive and pervasive MPLS network deployments. Satellite business divisions often face being left behind in these companies due to their inability to contribute on a level playing field, despite the strategic advantage and diversity that comes as standard with a satellite service. However, those carriers that do make use of

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VSAT are increasingly looking towards systems to be able to extend the reach of their networks and obviate the need to use unreliable terrestrial partners in some areas. iDirect is developing support for features, such as BGP routing, in a general move towards greater integration with MPLS, pushed by some of its larger customers.

Advancing Mobile Communications: Another area which we identified in our last report, but which had only just begun to emerge was in the mobile and semi-fixed business. Following adoption of the system by several of the larger providers in this segment iDirect has essentially managed to position its product as the de facto standard in this area. Through a combination of an extremely professional, well thought-out sales strategy and the integration of high level features such as a global Network Management System (NMS), communications-on-the-move and an enhanced mobility capability that automatically switches satellites when a user moves from one footprint to another known as automatic beam switching, iDirect technology is now often seen by the end-users themselves as the optimum solution and it is they themselves which are sometimes demanding it of their operators. This has persuaded almost every single operator in this high-value and very specialised segment to implement the iDirect platform. In fact, Intelsat has selected iDirect for its new maritime offering that includes iDirect's Global NMS with automatic beam switching technology. More recent developments, which include the spread spectrum capability provided in the Series 8000 terminal, further help to consolidate its position in this area and open the possibilities to serve some Comms-on-the-Move (COTM) projects.

Meeting Government Demands: Finally, the huge demand for satellite connectivity which has emerged from the US defence establishment and the way in which services are procured under the small and disadvantaged business programmes in the US Government has been extremely beneficial for iDirect. Small operators looking for a system with a low initial capital outlay which is capable of allowing incremental expansion to give greater coverage from new locations or on different satellites have adopted the iDirect platform almost wholesale. The US Department of Defense endorsed iDirect as one of its standard platforms not least because of the system’s strong encryption capabilities that include advanced FIPS 140-2 certified TRANSEC security, but also because it offers the data rates, CIR and QoS features which are essential for a military mission critical application.