tech track papers

Categories: 2016, Government Science and Communication

Does Commercial Satellite Broadband Have the DoD Aiming Behind the Technology Target?

Today the Department of Defense has 13 purpose-built communication satellites in use providing warfighters with over 21 Gbps of capacity including three MUOS satellites with 120 Mbps of capacity, three AEHF satellites with 5.4 Gbps of capacity, and 7 WGS satellites with 14.7 Gbps of capacity. The Department also leases an additional 10 GHz of bandwidth creating an additional pool of over 15 Gbps of capacity. Today’s commercial satellite broadband communication systems are delivering over 10 times this total capacity in a single satellite system, providing the opportunity for the Department to leverage the full advantage of these systems to significantly better warfighter capabilities in the future. This paper will also discuss the motivations behind the development of these commercial HCS and satellite services that are creating multiple communication systems regionally optimizing the economics of two-way broadband communication and providing multi-path redundancy.  This paper will provide a path forward for the Department to take advantage of their continued evolution to assure current and future warfighter advantage. This paper will present how these new commercial spot beam and frequency reuse systems are enabling broadband communications; targeting new levels of services including worldwide coverage with flexible capacity allocation based on changing demand; providing simple deployable and mobile roaming terminals for ease-of-use, providing adaptive and active protection mechanisms for high availability operations in the threat environment; and enabling end-to-end based security and end-user provisioning to support a variety of joint missions. This paper is intended to form a market data baseline of commercial HCS and satellite services to inform the Department’s upcoming Wideband Analysis-of-Alternatives (AoA) to determine if the performance cost benefit of commercial HCS and satellite services offsets platform/terminal modifications necessary to employ them.

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Author: Richard VanderMeulen
Topic: Government, Science and Communication

  • Does Commercial Satellite Broadband Have the DoD Aiming Behind the Technology Target?

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