Hughes Initiates Commercial Service on SPACEWAY 3 Satellite

April 7, 2008

Hughes Network Systems, has successfully activated the first HughesNet^® consumer subscriber for broadband Internet service utilizing its SPACEWAY™ 3 satellite on April 3rd, 2008.

“With this significant milestone, our SPACEWAY 3 satellite has officially commenced carrying revenue-bearing traffic, making Hughes a fully integrated service provider,” said Pradman Kaul, president and CEO of Hughes. “We are excited to begin delivering HughesNet broadband services over the world's first commercial satellite with on-board switching to our rapidly growing base of consumer, SMB, enterprise, and government customers throughout North America .”

Launched by Arianespace in August, 2007, SPACEWAY 3 was subsequently placed into geostationary orbit by Boeing in December, 2007, at which time Hughes assumed operational control. Extensive pre-commercial testing has been completed since then and Hughes has now achieved its goal of commencing commercial service in early 2008.

With 10 Gigabits per second of gross capacity, SPACEWAY 3 is the highest traffic-carrying satellite to be brought into service in North America . It was designed and developed as a next-generation, Ka-band broadband satellite system, and is the world's first commercial satellite to employ on-board traffic switching and routing. Combined with many other advances in satellite technology, such as dynamic beam forming, and direct small-dish-to- small-dish connectivity, SPACEWAY 3 ushers in a new world of bandwidth-on-demand HughesNet services accessed through a range of high-performance ground terminals.