SES Government Solutions
Provides High-throughput Loopback Services to
U.S. Department of Defense
February 22, 2021
SES Government Solutions
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.