The ViaSat-3 F2 satellite is ready to go online to serve the Americas at a time when the company has been losing subscribers to rival Starlink.
Viasat plans to finally start serving users from its next-generation F2 satellite next month, enabling the Starlink competitor to deliver faster download speeds of over 100Mbps.
The F2 was launched into orbit in November to serve customers in the Americas. On Tuesday, Viasat reported it anticipates the satellite’s service entry by September 2026. A sister satellite, the F3. will also enter service for the Asia-Pacific market in late August or early September 2026.
“We’ve been waiting a long time for the capacity and capabilities of Viasat 3. Flights 2 and 3.” CFO Gary Chase said in an earnings call. “We’re excited to be on the cusp of service entry for both satellites.”
The median download speed for Viasat is currently 41 Mbps in the US, according to Speedtest.net’s parent, Ookla, a downgrade from the 125Mbps median download rate for Starlink. Hence, the F2 might help Viasat turn things around; the company has been bleeding fixed broadband subscribers ever since Starlink’s arrival in late 2020.
In the earnings report, Viasat said its fixed broadband subscribers fell to 115.000 in Q2. down from 130.000 in the previous period.
The F2 satellite is different from low-orbiting Starlink satellites in that it reaches a far higher altitude of 22.242 miles from Earth, or what’s called a geostationary orbit, compared with 300 miles. The higher altitude means a single geostationary satellite can serve a large geographic area, but at the expense of increased latency. For example, Viasat’s median latency can currently reach 750 milliseconds compared with Starlink’s 39ms.
We’ll be curious to see how the F2 performs. But Viasat is already signaling it’s more focused on serving government and enterprise customers, rather than consumers. In the earnings call, the company noted it’s seeing more revenue growth in the aviation industry as providers, including Delta and Southwest Airlines, adopt Viasat.
“We also have fixed consumer use, which has obviously been declining over time, mostly because the other markets are a lot more attractive,” Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said, likely alluding to Starlink.
The F2 deployed a key component in May: the large reflector, designed to boost the satellite’s broadband capacity. Last month, the FCC also cleared the F2 for US market operations when the satellite was originally designed to serve users in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The F2 is also filling a void left by Viasat’s earlier satellite, the F1. which malfunctioned in 2023 and failed to deploy its reflector. Despite the setback, the F1 has still had enough capacity to serve commercial airlines in North America.