Yahoo Finance Viasat (VSAT) Unveils High-Capacity Mercury FSOC Terminal
Viasat VSAT introduced the Mercury Free Space Optical Communications (“FSOC”) terminal during the U.S. Special Operations Command (“SOCOM”) Technical Experimentation event on Mar 21, 2023.
The latest Viasat Mercury solution helps military operators to minimize signature communications by leveraging its high-capacity FSOC link and an automated pointing, acquisition and tracking (PAT) system. It was designed to support use cases for terrestrial, expeditionary and SOCOM applications.
Modern electronic warfare can extensively disrupt radio frequency (RF) communications in contested near-peer environments, noted Viasat. In comparison to traditional RF systems, the Viasat FSOC solution will be highly immune to jamming, spoofing and electromagnetic interference. It is capable of providing data rates up to 40 Gbps with a range of up to 70 kms for terrestrial applications.
Viasat Inc. Price and Consensus
Viasat Inc. price-consensus-chart | Viasat Inc. Quote
The Mercury terminal offers an FSOC system with significantly higher range and throughput than existing options in the tactical environment by integrating advanced optical terminal technology with PAT gimbal and user-oriented control and management interface, added the company.
Mercury terminal will be able to serve a variety of expeditionary communications situations, such as Ground-to-Ground, Ground-to-Air, Ship-to-Ship and Ship-to-Shore, by utilizing a dual-stage continuous active line-of-sight tracking technology.
The company further highlighted that the Viasat Mercury solution is an investment in FSO as part of a resilient multi-transport network for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) as the latter tries to gain an advantage through increasingly reliable and low-detection communications. The Mercury terminal is a high-capacity and low-cost solution for the DoD. The company continues to invest in “comms-on-the-move” capabilities across sea, air and space.
Viasat designs, develops and markets advanced digital satellite telecommunications and other wireless networking and signal processing equipment. The company serves its high-bandwidth, high-performance communications solutions to public and military enterprises as well as government enterprises.
In January, the company announced that it had inked a contract with the U.S. Marine Corps to provide end-to-end satellite communications (SATCOM) support via a fully-managed service. The agreement extends the pilot and follow-on service program that Viasat completed in fiscal 2022. This fully-managed SATCOM service includes a scalable, quickly deployable and resilient beyond-line-of-sight communication capability.
VSAT currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Shares of the company have lost 21.1% compared with the sub-industry’s decline of 8% in the past year.
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Stocks to Consider
Some better-ranked stocks in the broader technology space are Arista Networks ANET, Cadence Design Systems CDNS and Pegasystems PEGA, each presently sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
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Cadence’s earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in all the last four quarters, the average being 10.5%. Shares of CDNS have increased 35% in the past year.
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