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INVESTMENT
Share of the Week: Satellite Solutions Worldwide
David Byers
January 27 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Satellite Solutions Worldwide rents spare broadband capacity from orbiting satellites
Satellite Solutions Worldwide rents spare broadband capacity from orbiting satellites
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When it comes to the information superhighway, Britain sits firmly in the slow lane. About 3 per cent of UK households have access to �full fibre to the premises� broadband, which is transported through fibre optic cables to your door at speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps). This compares with 86.1 per cent in Portugal, 85.2 per cent in Latvia and 81.4 per cent in Lithuania.
What�s more, 300,000 people in rural areas get speeds of less than 2 Mbps, which means they cannot stream music or videos, or use apps. This is where Satellite Solutions Worldwide (SSW) comes in. The company, founded in 2008, rents spare capacity from orbiting satellites and beams broadband signals to some of the most remote households in Europe and Australia, without the need for cables. It is Europe�s largest satellite broadband provider.
The history SSW was founded by Simon Clifton, who helped Peter Jones of the BBC series Dragons� Den to build Phones International, and Andrew Walwyn, who started out as a salesman for Carphone Warehouse in the early 1990s. He went on to run and sell the tech company Tiny Computers and was a director of DX Communications, the mobile phone chain sold to BT Cellnet in 1999. �We lived on a farm and could not get a broadband connection even though our village, Beckley, was only five miles from the centre of Oxford,� he says. SSW has grown rapidly as governments struggle to meet the cost of installing fibre optic cables (up to �30,000 per home) nationwide. The British government promised broadband speeds of 10 Mbps for everyone by 2020, but many experts are sceptical that this is possible.
SSW has very low overhead costs. It rents broadband capacity from the satellite companies Eutelsat, SES and Avanti in Europe and NBN Sky Muster in Australia, and resells it directly to customers. It is the middleman, so has no responsibility for the expense of maintaining the satellites. The broadband it provides reaches speeds of 30 Mbps; the UK average is 16.51 Mbps.
Its customers include Bear Grylls, the adventurer, the BBC and the NHS. SSW floated on the London Stock Exchange in May 2015 with a share price of 4.5p. It is now hovering around 8p.
The performance
In the six months to May 31 last year, revenue increased 261 per cent to �20.6 million (up from �5.7 million a year earlier). The number of customers went up from 25,000 to 90,000 over the same period and by December SSW had hit its 100,000 target.
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