I just got off the Voyant International (VOYT) conference call. I hope you had a chance to listen in, but if you didn’t, there’s a replay available. I would summarize it here, but I didn’t get a chance to take notes. So, I encourage you to listen to the call. However, for those of you who are as busy as I am, there are a few highlights I think are worth knowing if you can’t do the replay. 

RocketStream is going well, and a fourth customer group is starting to solidify. They’d been focused on direct sales, sales through embedding, and sales through bundling. However, the fourth venue now coming into play is telecommunication carriers like Korea Telecom (KT). Basically, it’s a referral resource. KT’s customers who are dissatisfied with their Internet speeds are being told to purchase RocketStream.

If it were just one telco company in support of RocketStream, I might think little of it. However, a U.S.-based telco has also asked Voyant to possibly help them speed up their broadband connection. The deal, if it went through, would mean installing Voyant’s technology on 6 million modems (for starters). The sweetest part about the deal? Recurring revenue, and I guess a lot of it.

They didn’t say who the telco was, or where the technology trials were. Interesting, though, that they were approached.

Nevertheless, Voyant still feels embedding and bundling is the big-time venue for RocketStream.

Aviation Broadband - the much-awaited passenger-jet broadband service - is still in the works. They just completed their second test flight, topping the results from the first test, and exceeding their own expectations for this test. This 2nd test showed high capacity at an even greater distance from ground.

The concerns about existing competition came up (inevitably), and here’s what Voyant had to say…

Aviation Broadband will be better than current satellite services. Satellite connections are very expensive, costing about 100 x the cost of Voyant’s cost to deliver the same amount of data. As for current ground-based versions, those can’t scale up because they still have to share bandwidth. The more users they add to current ground-based services, the slower it gets. Voyant’s ‘pipe’ is bigger (and has higher capacity).

What about AirCell (Aviation Broadband’s big competition already taking on market share)? AirCell is priming the pump, but Voyant can steal the market once cultivated.

Voyant provides 10x more bandwidth than Aircell, and AirCell can only provide service in North America. Voyant is focused beyond the United States, and said Europe may be the first Aviation Broadband market. Plus, Aircell’s limited bandwidth is shared among all the planes in the sky. [It became clear the competition they were panning earlier in the call was AirCell.] Voyant plans to transmit at 35 Mbps to each plane, no matter how many planes are in the air.

Voyant also added they used RocketStream to deliver movie content from Voyant Productions via Aviation Broadband, integrating all their technology. We hadn’t heard much about Voyant Productions (TV and movie content) until now, but their interest in the business is becoming a little more clear - it fits well with the jet/broadband technology. Voyant Productions is still in formation, but there is some clear monetization potential here.

Harris Corporation is the partner they’ve got to help with testing and implementation. They now have a formal collaboration agreement in place, which wasn’t in place when the trials began.

Oh, and the wireless Internet radio deal - the $2 million contract from this summer - is ahead of schedule. They didn’t say what ‘ahead’ meant, so I still don’t know when they’ll be booking revenue from that.

All in all I learned a little. There wasn’t much discussion about numbers, but now we have some more framework in place to hang the dollars on when that data starts to flow in. 

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