Pricing Could Make, Break Satellite Flat Panel Antenna Market, NSR Says

Pricing will likely be the key factor determining whether flat panel antennas become widely adopted now that a products are to come to market in coming years, and if pricing isn't prioritized, it will be the main reason FPAs won't be successful, said Northern Sky Research analyst Dallas Kasaboski in an NSR blog post Monday. The big investment that has been made in FPA research and development means there's big pressure for commercialization, with performance being the big hurdle to deployment, as evidenced by the lengthy development times "and the current range of readiness of FPA technology," NSR said. It said those performance issues include low throughputs, noise, beam-steering requirements and side-lobe regulation.