The lack of spot beams on Quetzsat 1 makes one wonder whattheir long range plans are for the 77W slot. Why would they construct it with North American beams if they just were goingto use it for local into local service?
Some background facts:
Internationals moving off 61.5W freeing up bandwidth at 61.5W (announced).
Echostar 15 goes to spare status upon launch of Echostar 16(they noted in a filing that E16 would replace “the satellites” at 61.5W)
Echostar 16 will probably have ~50 spot beams and Conus,similar to their other newer spot beam/Conus satellites, providing three times the spot beam capacity of Echostar 12 (34 or so more spots than today). Is this enough for their spot beam requirement?
Dish will have access to the remaining 7-8 transponders onNimiq 5 at 72.5W by year end (assuming the Directv lease ends at that time).
Echostar 8, with its 32 transponders, will move to 86.5W inFeb 2012 with two beams. One will cover southern US markets (avoiding Canadian interference) and a Mexico beam.
Quetzsat 1 at 77W will have two North American beams that extend from close to the Canadian border down to Panama with 32 transponders (presently 8 Dish Mexico and 24 Dish)
Echostar 8 and Quetzsat 1 will be separated by 9.5 degrees which will fit a single dish antenna .
A mashup of the ~50 dBw reception contours of the 4 beams onE8 and Quetzsat shows the approximate reception areas for those beams (attached). The green contour is the E8 Southern Conus beam.
And, my guess for the future:
Dish/DishMexico may have a single dish solution with 64 transponders covering North America, from Panama up to the Canadian border. No one else has that capability.
Could it be they plan on creating a major network covering the entire market? They could easily combine both Spanish and English programming on the two satellites, toss in the major Mexican networks, nationals from a local city in the US and have a dynamite network with 20 million or so Spanish/English customers and still have capacity for some US local into local transmission.
And, no significant problem with cross border transmissions since, unlike US and Canada, US and Mexico have a bilateral agreement allowing access to each other’s markets.
Time will tell