Hughes to Provide Barrett Xplore with Hughes SPACEWAY 3 Satellite Equipment & Capacity

June 16, 2008

Hughes Network Systems, LLC will provide advanced SPACEWAY™ 3 broadband satellite equipment and services to broadband provider Barrett Xplore Inc. of New Brunswick, Canada. The contract includes satellite capacity on SPACEWAY 3, a gateway earth station, and remote terminals. Barrett Xplore will offer the broadband satellite services to the Canadian market under its Xplornet brand.

“Xplornet is investing in technology to further our mandate to provide urban-quality broadband to homes and businesses in rural Canada,” said John Maduri, CEO of Barrett Xplore. “The addition of services based on the Hughes technology allows us to expand capacity in Canada to help bridge the rural-urban digital divide.”

The SPACEWAY 3 platform delivers highly efficient and robust residential service and is also ideal for the business customer with its onboard switching and routing capability, providing direct branch-to-branch/small-dish-to-small dish connectivity. Using the SPACEWAY 3 platform will allow Barrett Xplore to accelerate growth in all parts of Canada .

“By using the new capabilities provided by the SPACEWAY 3 platform, Barrett Xplore can better serve their markets across Canada ,” said Mike Cook, senior vice president at Hughes. “In addition to enabling higher speed services, SPACEWAY 3 also offers end-to-end Class of Service (CoS) capabilities to better prioritize business applications for the best performance possible.”

Initially, Barrett Xplore will roll out Ka-band service focusing primarily on the residential and home office market using pre-determined service packages that operate on Hughes gateway earth stations. Services for business and residential users on the Barrett Xplore owned and operated network are scheduled to be available in the second half of 2008.

The SPACEWAY 3 satellite was launched in August 2008 and is the largest commercial satellite in North America , as well as the world's first commercial satellite with on-board switching and routing, the first “switch-in-the-sky”, enabling single hop, dish-to-dish connectivity. Commercial service began April 3, 2008