Indian firm reveals when it will launch country's 1st private communication satellite

Ananth Technologies is building AnanthSat-1, India's first privately made communication satellite. Chairman Dr Subba Rao Pavuluri told IndiaToday.in it will carry more than 100 Gbps to widen broadband, tele-education and telemedicine across remote India.

In Short

• Ananth is building India's first private communication satellite, called AnanthSat-1.
• The Ka-band satellite will carry more than 100 Gbps capacity.
• It will widen broadband, tele-education and telemedicine across remote India.

For decades, every communication satellite that carried India's television signals, phone calls and internet was built by the government. That is about to change.

Ananth Technologies, a Hyderabad company that has helped build more than 109 satellites and 89 launch vehicles since 1992, is now constructing AnanthSat-1, the first communication satellite to be made by a private Indian firm.

Its chairman and managing director, Dr Subba Rao Pavuluri, who is also president of the Satcom Industry Association – India (SIA-India), told IndiaToday.in at the India Space Congress held in New Delhi this week that the satellite will launch in 2029.

It is a direct result of the reforms that opened India's space sector to private companies only a few years ago. Until then, building and operating a communication satellite was something only the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) did.

A FIRST OF ITS KIND SATELLITE

The satellite will sit in geostationary orbit. This is a high orbit, about 36,000 kilometres above the equator, where a satellite circles the Earth at exactly the speed the planet spins, so from the ground it appears to hover over one fixed point.

In other words, a geostationary satellite takes 24 hours to circle the Earth. That is why a dish on your roof never has to move.

AnanthSat-1 has been allotted a slot at 89 degrees east, along with the radio spectrum it needs.

It will operate in the Ka-band, a high-frequency band of radio waves that can carry far more data than the bands older satellites relied on. In plain terms, the Ka-band is what makes fast, heavy internet from space possible.

AnanthSat-1 is what is called a high-throughput satellite, which means it is designed to move far more data than a conventional communication satellite of similar size. It will offer more than 100 Gbps, or gigabits per second, a measure of how much information it can move at once. The need is enormous.

Dr Pavuluri pointed to a government estimate that India requires more than 1,000 Gbps of satellite bandwidth, a gap private players are now being asked to help close.

WHAT IT WILL CARRY TO THE GROUND

The point of all that capacity is reach. Ananth wants the satellite to carry broadband into the places ordinary networks struggle to serve, the remote villages and mountainous terrain where laying cables and towers is hard.

From there, Dr Pavuluri said, the same bandwidth can carry tele-education and telemedicine, letting a specialist doctor in a city advise a patient in a far-off district, or a teacher reach a classroom that has none.

The satellite will also serve the Navy, the Air Force and the Army, alongside civilian users.

Ananth plans to assemble and test the satellite in India, a stage engineers call AIT, short for assembly, integration and testing, before it flies on an Indian rocket.

Depending on its final weight, the final rocket could be the heavy-lift LVM3 or the smaller PSLV or SSLV, the launch vehicles Isro uses to carry satellites of different sizes to orbit. It will go up as a collaborative mission carrying other satellites too.

For Dr Pavuluri, who left Isro in 1991 to start a private space company before India really had one, it is a long-held ambition: to make the country not just a user of satellites, but a place that builds them for the world.

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