ViaSat Inc.'s purchase of consumer satellite broadband provider and partner WildBlue Communications offers a lesson for service providers: If you refuse to buy the hardware, the hardware may decide to buy you.rnAfter its late-2007 decision to spend nearly $400 million to build its own broadband satellite, ViaSat, with the WildBlue transaction, has now doubled its bet that satellite broadband in North America has a huge potential that WildBlue and its direct competitor, Hughes Network Systems, have only begun to harvest.rnHughes' HughesNet and WildBlue together have less than 900,000 subscribers. ViaSat Chief Executive Mark Dankberg, in an Oct. 1 interview, said WildBlue alone should be able to count 1.5 million subscribers or more in 2014 using its current satellites plus the ViaSat-1 spacecraft scheduled for launch in early 2011.
展开▼
