Telesat chooses Cobham terminals
February 3, 2022
By Chris Forrester
Ottawa-based satellite operator Telesat has struck an agreement with Cobham for its Tracker 4000 terminals for Telesat’s planned low Earth orbiting Lightspeed satellite constellation.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cobham SATCOM will manufacture, integrate, and install advanced Ka-band tracking antennas at Telesat’s sites throughout the world, and provide long-term logistics and maintenance support. The radome-protected antennas will provide accurate tracking in adverse weather conditions, ensuring high availability and throughput for carrier-grade performance. Based on Cobham SATCOM’s successful TRACKER Gateway series, the Telesat terminals can offer industry-leading performance, high reliability, and low total cost of ownership, says a statement.
“Cobham SATCOM’s innovative antenna technology delivers robust, resilient and highly-efficient performance with compelling economics,” said Aneesh Dalvi, Telesat’s Director of LEO Landing Stations and User Terminals. “The low power consumption of the TRACKER antennas provides significant financial benefits, and is well-aligned with Telesat Lightspeed objectives to provide best-in-class enterprise-grade connectivity while reducing the carbon footprint of our system and maintaining a green and sustainable planet.”
Telesat’s telecom, enterprise, maritime and aviation customer terminals will connect to the Telesat Lightspeed satellites that carry the user traffic through the mesh space network to Landing Stations deployed globally. Each Telesat Lightspeed Landing Station will host multiple TRACKER antennas, along with the baseband, network and control systems. The Landing Stations will connect user traffic to Points-of-Presences for telecom networks, internet and cloud services, and will support private interconnection for customer networks.
The units will enable the Telesat Lightspeed network to provide 15 terabits (Tb/s) of global network capacity.
The order is good news for Cobham, but missing from Telesat is – as yet – confirmation of an order for its planned Lightspeed fleet with prime contractor Thales Alenia Space.