July 8

Hughes Network Systems, LLC announced that Sistemas Tecnicos de Loterias del Estado (STL) has awarded its wholly owned subsidiary, HNS Ltd., a contract to provide a geographically redundant HN System Network Operations Center (NOC), 2800 HN7700S broadband satellite routers, and support/maintenance services for five years. STL provides information technology and telecommunications services to the Entidad Publico Empresarial Loterias y Apuestas del Estado Espanol (LAE), the Spanish state lottery authority. Handling over two million lottery transactions per year, STL is Spain's leading gaming technology and telecommunications company.

"We issued an RFP in order to find the most suitable communications solution for our lower volume, more remote point-of-sales sites," said Alfonso Pedro Fernandez Garcia, STL's Director of Communications and New Sales Channels. "We evaluated mobile communications, DSL, and satellite IP technologies, and from 15 proposals concluded that the best balance among Quality of Service (QoS) assurance, cost per transaction, and coverage would be provided by a satellite IP solution. We chose the HN System from Hughes because of the capabilities of the HN7700S platform and our long-standing relationship with Hughes. As we are migrating from X.25 to pure IP, we needed the latest, state-of-the-art equipment which will enable us to provide better service quality and enable future broadband applications."

"This agreement builds upon our successful 10 year relationship with STL and is evidence of the strategic importance of the lottery sector to Hughes and our leadership in serving it, following major contracts with GTECH in the US and Camelot in the UK," said Luigi Pagni, vice president, Sales and Marketing of Hughes Europe. "STL will now enjoy the benefits of our latest HN System platform which is based on the world's most widely deployed standard, IPoS/DVBS2 with ACM (adaptive coding modulation), yielding higher throughputs and more efficient bandwidth utilization."