The sudden interest in Ka-band satellite communications during the middle of this decade is not an accident. It comes as a result of supply economics meeting a perceived demand for new services. On the supply side, nearly two decades of R&D into using the Ka-band for satellite communications has produced results. Up until recently, the satellite communications industry has been wary of using Ka-band because it is subject to substantial interference from rain (rain fade). That problem has now largely been circumvented. Much more significantly, NASA launched an advanced Ka-band satellite in 1993 that uses on-board processing and switching, pencil spot beams and the Ka-band - the three key technologies for the new commercial Ka-band satellites.
NASA's ACTS satellite performed extremely well; the project was very well managed and involved testing a wide variety of new ground stations and services (the ACTS experiments are continuing). By the mid-1990s it was clear that the existing frequency bands being used by satellite operators had insufficient spectrum left to provide new bandwidth hungry two way broadband services. The Ka-band, in contrast, was little used. The Ka-band available to satellite operators involved a massive 2.5-3.5 GHz of spectrum - that is to say some 4-7 times that available to some C-band satellite operators. On the demand side, the growth of Internet as a mass-market consumer (and business) service and perceived likely growth in demand for multimedia (services combining two way video, voice, data and graphics) indicated a need to provide substantive infrastructure for two way services and associated switching technology. Ka-band satellites offered one major solution to meeting the demand. Indeed, there is growing belief that the main market for Ka-band satellites will be the provision of high speed Internet and Intranet access. Thus by 1997 some 59 Ka-band projects had emerged world wide alongside an intensified R&D effort to refine Ka-band satellite and associated technologies.