OTTAWA – Telesat has announced plans to acquire a new satellite that could launch as early as 2018.
Telstar 19 Vantage will be the second of a new generation of Telesat satellites optimized to serve the types of bandwidth intensive applications increasingly being used across the satellite industry, the company said Wednesday. With two high throughput payloads, one in Ku-band and the other in Ka-band, the new satellite will be co-located with Telesat’s Telstar 14R at 63 degrees West, a prime orbital slot for coverage of the Americas.
Hughes Network Systems was confirmed as an anchor customer on the bird.
“Telstar 19 Vantage is a versatile, state-of-the-art satellite optimized to serve growing markets in the Americas from Telesat’s prime 63 degrees West location,” said Telesat president and CEO Dan Goldberg, in the news release. “Telesat is pleased to have Hughes as an anchor tenant on this spacecraft and equally excited to be bringing new high throughput capacity to serve Latin America, Northern Canada and mobile broadband requirements in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, all markets where we have a leading position.”
Telesat added that it expects to enter into a construction agreement for Telstar 19 Vantage in the coming weeks. The price to build the bird was not disclosed.
