Former CapRock CTO Philip Harlow has found a new position at XTAR as president and COO, responsible for the growth and strategic direction of Xtar’s global X-band business as well as overseeing management, marketing and technical aspects of the company.
    Harlow, a British military veteran with experience in nearly every level of the military satellite service value chain, joined Xtar June 1, following CapRock’s $525 million acquisition by Harris Corp. Via Satellite spoke with Harlow during his first week on the job about the history and future of the growing X-band market and what role XTAR will play in market development.

Harlow: Leading a company is a role I relish, and it’s a step up from being CTO as I have more responsibility than I did before. I’m also coming on board at a time when there is a lot to do at XTAR. We have two spacecraft up, and we’re selling capacity to a market with a growing awareness of X-band capability.

Harlow: XTAR is a good fit for me and there are several reasons why. The first and most important being that I know a lot about the X-band market and Xtar presents the unique challenge of serving that niche. The new job also puts me back in the satellite operator world, where I came from. It is also a good time to be getting into X-band, and I see a lot of potential as it continues to be in a growth stage. I believe that because I have experience as a customer of XTAR over the past four or five years, the company has a good foundation and is on the cusp of doing something really special.

Harlow: I have a military background, as I was in the British Army for almost 12 years. I operated those VSAT back in the 90s just after the Gulf War in the northern and southern no-fly zones. I was in those dusty places trying to make those X-band links work. I understand the military end-user experience of twisting knobs on the terminal. I’ve also been involved in the design of the network services and the terminals deployed in the field as well as the contract vehicles by which we get business from the government.

Harlow: For one, I understand the pain that operators and customers have to go through under the government cycles. I understand the need to adapt when things change and to anticipate those changes to help the customer base get what they need.
    Through the latter seven years of the DSTSG program, I worked at PanAmSat and was part of the Intelsat acquisition. At that time, we were desperate for access to the customers. Working through integrators, such as Artel, Arrowhead and Spacelink, we sometimes got to a stage where we just weren’t getting the information fast enough to respond to our customers fast enough, so I’ve been on that operator side.

Harlow: Commercially provided X-band is still a fairly new concept. It has taken some time to get the awareness of its capability as an augmentation to the WGS system out there to the military user. With the cyclical nature of people coming in and out of military positions, operators and service providers have to constantly educate and remind people that this capability exists, especially in the United States. X-band is already seeing wide use by other governments. The Spanish government has been using it with very small terminals for several years already. However, the growing awareness is starting to show in the U.S. We’re getting more inquiries about available capacity and capabilities, with a noticeable increase in the last few months.

Harlow: There have been many reports on the increased need for bandwidth all across the militaries due to the lack of C- and Ku-band capacity in critical areas of the world such as Africa and Afghanistan. The military’s relationship with X-band has developed in two significant ways. The first was the inclusion of X-band in the DSTSG and its continuing inclusion in the FCSA procurement. The second is the inclusion of X-band in the U.S. Navy’s CBSP program as a replacement for CWSP.  These developments show the military’s growing acknowledgement of and comfort level with commercial services.