SES Government Solutions (SES GS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SES, in partnership with a U.S. government customer, has designed, developed and is fielding an O3b Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) loopback capability, the company reported on Monday.
The awarded task order is against the single-award Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with DOD for Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) low-latency High Throughput Satellite (HTS) services. SES GS’ solution will improve mission-critical communications for Department of Defense (DoD) operations in remote locations in Southwest Asia.
"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 GS, Brig. Gen. Pete Hoene, USAF (ret.).
With SES GS’ loopback configuration, customers will have a high-throughput, low-latency capability without using a commercial gateway. The configuration will utilize an in-theatre hub and provide in-beam connectivity.
The solution will be managed and controlled from an SES Network Operations Centre (NOC) via a Skala Network terminal. The loopback configuration will leverage two MEO beams in loopback mode across five sites, each providing up to 450 Mbps of capacity, connecting users to required points of presence.
The agile nature of the loopback solution-set will provide the ability to leverage MEO connectivity solutions, and will serve as a bridge to SES’s next-generation O3b mPOWER communications system.
"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," Hoene added.
