SES Government Solutions (SES GS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SES, in close partnership with a key U.S. Government customer, designed, developed and is fielding an O3b Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) loopback capability to provide greatly improved mission-critical communications for Department of Defense operations in remote locations in Southwest Asia. The awarded task order is against the single-award Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) low-latency High Throughput Satellite (HTS) services.
Using the loopback configuration, U.S. Government customers can take advantage of the high-throughput, low-latency capability without using a commercial gateway. The configuration leverages an in-theatre hub and provides in-beam connectivity, similarly to a hub-spoke configuration, and is managed and controlled from an SES Network Operations Centre (NOC) via a Skala Network terminal. The solution utilises two MEO beams in loopback mode across five sites, each providing up to 450 Mbps of capacity, connecting users to required points of presence.
"As the need for secure communications and timely access to critical data on the battlefield increases, so does the need to have resilient and robust high-performance connectivity from any location," said President and CEO of SES Government Solutions, Brigadier General Pete Hoene, USAF (retired). "The growing threat within the region requires the troops to have access to near real-time decision-making intelligence at the tactical edge. This mission requires high-throughput, low-latency connectivity that only our O3b MEO constellation can provide flexibly. We understand this troops’ mission requirements in areas where there is no reliable terrestrial connectivity, and we're excited to bring innovative and secure solutions via satellite to solve their problems."
The agile nature of the loopback solution-set provides the most tactical-edge customers the ability to leverage MEO connectivity solutions, and acts as a bridge to SES’s game-changing next-generation O3b mPOWER communications system.