Kacific to issue RFP for second satellite
June 7, 2022
By Chris Forrester
Singapore-based (but Vanuatu-registered) Kacific Broadband Satellite, already using its half of a joint-venture satellite (with Japan’s JCSat-18), says it will soon issue a formal Request for Proposals for its own satellite.
Kacific CEO Christian Patouraux, speaking at the Asia Satellite Business week, said the company has been in discussion from some potential satellite manufacturers. The brief is to extend the company’s footprints from its existing 25-nation coverage, Kacific-1 asset, and using 56 spot beams from its 150 degrees East orbital slot.
Currently Kacific is mostly focusing on business out of the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand.
Patouraux admitted that the likes of Elon Musk’s Starlink or Jeff Bezos’s Kuiper could spend millions of dollars on the Asia-Pacific markets without much thought to an economic return. However, he warned: “This will lead to bankruptcies and a loss of money for investors, which will impact the industry. When we do a back-of-the-envelope assessment, the price point they reach for bandwidth is not particularly cheaper than what we can achieve with GEO satellites today, let alone what we can achieve with GEOs later.”