Satellite Operators Assess Road Ahead for Wideband Global Satcom
The private sector and government must continue working together to pave the way forward for more cost-effective use of military and commercial satellites and an integrated operational architecture for both areas, satellite operators said Thursday during a Washington Space Business Roundtable event. Government efforts to develop bandwidth pathfinders, and take advantage of commercially hosted payloads, will help satisfy wideband global satcom (WGS) needs, they said.
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The two sectors must work to come up with an integrated architecture that combines the best of what government and commercial satellites can do to solve the problems involving bandwidth, capacity and other issues that are all over the world, said Peter Hadinger, Inmarsat president-U.S. Government Business Unit. That involves figuring out “how to make the best use of the satellite resources that already exist,” while there is WGS, he said. Having resources that are aligned in spectrum bands where government satellites are operating is important, he said. One of easiest things is to have terminals that can tune into one or more different bands to operate across both commercial and military resources, he said. This doesn’t require new launches and new capabilities to accomplish, “yet would go a long way toward improving the interoperability of these systems and reducing the costs to the government of using commercial where it’s best used,” he said.
Skot Butler, Intelsat General vice president-satellite networks and space services, suggested altering how the protection process is defined. Industry and government should approach protection as “a range of things that can be done and layers that can be put onto spacecraft, including on commercial spacecraft,” he said. Intelsat deploys command and control encryption, telemetry encryption and steerable beams on its satellites to ensure communications, he said. New architectures have spot beams that allow operators to isolate where a jammer is originating, he said.
Although hosted payloads have been in use for a long time, there has been renewed interest in taking up hosted payloads, which is good for industry, said David Bair, Eutelsat America president. With renewed emphasis on cost and budget cutting, it gives government “a very economical way to get into space,” he said. The government’s pathfinder program can lead to using hosted payloads for telecoms, he said. “Some of the future pathfinders certainly look like hosted payloads, because they will be subsets of the payload.” Pathfinders are a way to explore alternative business models, “to change the way we define the problem,” said Tip Osterthaler, SES Government Solutions CEO.
Some of the executives pushed back against findings in a Department of Defense report that the Pentagon paid more than $14,000 per MHz of WGS bandwidth last year, compared with more than $56,000 per MHz of commercial bandwidth. It’s an “unrealistic number,” and the industry should seek the data that provided the number in that analysis, Bair said, referring to the report on satellite communications strategy.
Hadinger compared making a decision to pay for commercial satellite services to deciding when to rent or own a car. It’s a false argument to get into a specific dollars and cents comparison on a per MHz or per day basis, he said. “When we fly someplace, we don’t own a car at LAX.” Renting is less expensive, and “we can’t afford to own a car everywhere,” he said. “There is a proper match for where it makes more sense to own and where it makes more sense to rent.” While it costs more dollars per day, “the government would save money by being able to go to the commercial market, use what it needs when it needs it, and return it back to where it came from when they’re done,” he said.
There were some good features to the report, and other parts showed that the DOD is still resistant to change, said Osterthaler. He was encouraged by the notion that the National Defense Authorization Act language leverages the working capital fund to serve as a test bed for new business models, he said.
DOD has to be a smart buyer, said Philip Harlow, XTAR president. Satellite operators and the department must find a way for the agency to buy multiyear plans, he said. Operators talk to different entities within the agency about commercial and military satcom, he said. There needs to be a way to get away from the 10-year decision cycle at DOD, he said. “The major problem we have is that there is some inertia in DOD.” The Pentagon may not know exactly what it needs or where it will need it, but it has predicted its bandwidth growth, and applications and tools it would need, he said. “When you spend billions of dollars on a satellite fleet, you need to have some business plan to back it up.”
Change rarely happens from within an institutional framework, said Osterthaler. It usually takes a huge crisis or happens when a “very senior person has enough time to force change from the top down,” he said. Convincing the government to commit to long-term leasing for services won’t solve every problem, he said. The pathfinder approach changes the conversation, he said. There is a push to define a single architecture which identifies key roles for milsatcom providers and satcom providers, Osterthaler added. "Each has an important role to play."