Viasat

Viasat started in 1986 as a small satellite communications engineering firm in Carlsbad, California, founded by Mark Dankberg, Mark Miller, and Steve Hart, and it has grown since into a global satellite operator with a defense business that now rivals its commercial one in importance. The company's own high-throughput satellite constellation, ViaSat-1 and ViaSat-2 and the newer ViaSat-3 series, underpins its residential broadband service and its in-flight WiFi business, which equips commercial and business aircraft around the world. That commercial footprint expanded enormously in 2023 when Viasat closed a roughly $7.3 billion acquisition of Inmarsat, the British satellite operator known for maritime safety communications and its global L-band network, a deal that folded Inmarsat's aviation, maritime, and government satcom businesses into Viasat's own.

The combined company now organizes its commercial work around aviation connectivity, maritime services still marketed partly under the Inmarsat brand, fixed and residential broadband, and enterprise and energy-sector communications for customers like offshore oil and gas operators. On the government side, Viasat supplies tactical satellite communications terminals, modems, and waveforms for the US military and allied forces, along with its ArcLight technology for flexible, on-demand satellite bandwidth access and its Tactical Mission Fabric platform, which is meant to let different networks and data sources interoperate across a battlefield. Its Eclypt line of encrypted storage devices and its broader encryption business cover data protection from the tactical edge through cloud and enterprise systems, an area that grew more central to Viasat's identity after it sold its legacy Link-16 tactical data link and MIDS terminal business to L3Harris in 2023 as part of a mandated divestiture tied to the Inmarsat deal's antitrust review.

Viasat's government work also spans ISR support, border security communications, blue force tracking, and positioning, navigation, and timing services, aimed at giving deployed forces resilient connectivity even in contested or denied environments where commercial cellular and fixed networks are unavailable or actively jammed. Headquartered in Carlsbad with a significant international presence in London following the Inmarsat acquisition, Viasat employs around 7,000 people worldwide and trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker VSAT as an S&P 600 component. Between its own satellite fleet and Inmarsat's global network, the combined company now operates one of the broadest commercial and government satellite communications footprints of any single provider, spanning geostationary, L-band, and emerging low-Earth-orbit capacity that lets the company offer customers a mix of coverage options depending on latency and bandwidth needs.