Viasat Says Completed ViaSat-3 Fleet Will Boost Broadband and Airline Connectivity as Q2 Revenue Rises 3% to $1.2 Billion

Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said the ViaSat-3 fleet is now complete, made up of three high-throughput satellites serving the US, Europe/MENA and Asia-Pacific regions, and that the satellites are making a difference. He said they will energise Viasat's broadband markets and help revive the company as a major provider of airline connectivity.

Dankberg described the work still under way to bring the capacity into service: "We are adding more bandwidth capacity through the ground network, and migrating more user terminals onto those satellites," he said. He added that customers are measuring "pretty drastic improvements in speed" and that per-user bandwidth consumption is comparable to that claimed for LEO service.

On the financial side, Viasat's Q2 revenue rose 3% to $1.2 billion.

The fleet's completion puts Viasat's claim to a practical test. Low-earth-orbit constellations have set the benchmark for speed and latency in aviation and consumer broadband, and Viasat is arguing that a geostationary architecture with enough capacity per satellite can match them on the metric customers feel most, per-user bandwidth. The comparison to LEO is Dankberg's own, so it is a company claim rather than an independent measurement.

The capacity story also depends on two things Dankberg himself named: expanding the ground network and migrating terminals onto the new satellites. Satellite capacity only turns into customer experience once both are in place, so the pace of that migration is what separates a launched fleet from an earning one.

For airline connectivity, the segment where Viasat says it wants to regain standing, the relevant evidence will be customer-measured speed results of the kind Dankberg cites, and whether those improvements translate into revenue growth beyond the 3% reported for Q2.