ViaSat has inaugurated its first Research and Development (R&D) centre in Chennai, India. The new Centre advances ViaSat’s globalisation efforts, strengthens its presence in India and enables the company to tap into high-quality engineering talent to drive technology innovation.
The new Chennai R&D centre will help ViaSat on its mission to connect the world with high-speed broadband internet. The news comes as India continues to transform into a digitally-empowered society under the government’s ‘Digital India’ and ‘Smart Cities’ programmes.
“India is a recognised technology innovation hub with highly-sought after engineering talent and business potential,” said Mark Dankberg, ViaSat Chairman and CEO. “The new centre in Chennai is a major step in building ViaSat’s footprint in Asia, makingIndia important to our strategic globalisation efforts, R&D acceleration initiatives and our ability to bring comprehensive, next-generation cloud, virtualisation, networking and sophisticated network management applications to market.”
Beginning in 2019, ViaSat will launch the first of threeViaSat-3 class satellite platforms. Each ViaSat-3 class satellite will offer 1,000 Gbps (or 1 Terabit per second) of network capacity, making each satellite equal to the total capacity of all commercial satellites in space today – combined. The first two satellites will focus on the Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), respectively, with a third satellite system planned for the Asia Pacific region, completing ViaSat’s global service coverage.
“The investments made by ViaSat in the new Chennai R&D Centre represent a commitment towards accelerating our innovation efforts,” said Sathya Narayanaswamy, VP and country manager, ViaSat India. “If Indian government policy allows, a ViaSat-3 class satellite could connect millions of Indians to broadband internet, potentially adding billions to India’s gross domestic product.”
The ViaSat R&D Centre will have more than 30,000sqft to accommodate nearly 125 engineers. By 2019, ViaSat expects to have more than 250 engineers in Chennai working on next-generation technologies.
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