Telesat announced yesterday a proposed secured note offering that would see the company raise up to US$500 million. It was the latest news in a recent flurry related to their Lightspeed LEO satellite network.
Telesat issued two press releases yesterday related to the note offering. The first outlined the proposed secured notes offering where it “intends to issue US$500 million of senior secured notes due 2026 (the “Senior Secured Notes”) secured by a first priority lien on the collateral that secures Telesat’s existing credit agreement and existing 4.875% senior secured notes due 2027.”
The second press release announced the pricing of the secured notes offering set at 5.625%. Telesat said they intend “to use the net proceeds from the Offering to fund additional investment into one or more unrestricted subsidiaries for the development of Telesat Lightspeed, Telesat’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network, for the payment of fees and expenses related to the Offering, and if the funding needs of Telesat Lightspeed are less than currently anticipated, for general corporate purposes.”
The company also issued another press release yesterday announcing they had selected Netcracker Technology, an NEC Corporation subsidiary, to provide the Lightspeed LEO constellation with their cloud-native Digital Business Support System/Operations Support System (BSS/OSS) software suite.
Telesat said the Netcracker BSS/OSS software suite “will provide Converged Charging and Rating; Product Catalog; Configure, Price, Quote; Partner Lifecycle Management; Customer Billing Management and Active Mediation from Netcracker Digital BSS, and Active Resource Inventory, Service Quality Management, Service Orchestration and Configuration Management from Netcracker Digital OSS. These tools will be used by Telesat’s “Sales, Order Management, Orchestration, Network Management and Service Assurance requirements” for Lightspeed LEO.
“The Netcracker full-stack BSS/OSS solution is optimized for global network deployments and provides the industry’s most powerful tools to quickly respond to customer needs and deliver new services to market,” said Erwin Hudson, Vice President, LEO, at Telesat. “Telesat and Netcracker share a culture of innovation, and we are confident in their ability to deliver on our vision of a flexible and efficient cloud-native technology platform that will maximize the quality of experience for our customers.”
Telesat also recently announced that they had joined MEF to Advance Digital Transformation through Telesat Lightspeed and selected CloudOps to Develop Cloud Infrastructure for Telesat Lightspeed LEO Network.
Where once Telesat was moving at a tortoise pace with respect to their Lightspeed LEO satellite network, they are now moving like a hare as the race is on to build LEO satellite constellations and garner customers.