The launch of the third Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite in December, along with the planned launches of several next-generation commercial satellites, has ushered in a new broadband satellite era where Ka-band and X-band systems are giving fresh capacity options to a bandwidth-hungry military. An increasingly mobile fighting force is driving satellite high broadband’s growth — with the need to communicate over networks to support command and control, imagery, streaming video and other data-intensive applications.

U.S. Department of Defense satcom officials say the capacity of each WGS satellite is nearly equivalent to the entire Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) system it is replacing. WGS also is substantially more cost-effective than leased commercial satcom bandwidth — a benefit that is compelling in a tight fiscal environment and will continue to be evident as more users transition from long-term dependence on commercial Ku-band broadband systems. U.S. government spending on commercial bandwidth was just shy of $600 million in 2009, according to Bruce Bennett, program executive officer for Satcom, Teleport and Services for the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), the Pentagon combat support agency that oversees all satcom acquisition activities. Bennett anticipates no significant drop off in commercial connectivity use by the government even with the rollout of WGS. “The problem you have is the demand is growing at such an explosive rate that WGS is just going to heat up the growth,” he says, contending that every satellite frequency will have a role to play in this explosive market. 

New Satellites Offer Unprecedented Gains

Market research firm NSR says that even with WGS and other assets coming down the pike, the military’s bandwidth capacity concerns will be evident throughout the next decade. “I believe the bandwidth crunch for the military will continue well into 2020,” says Claude Rousseau, satellite communications analyst for NSR, predicting that commercial bandwidth usage will decline incrementally as military entities begin to rely more heavily on internal resources and shift traffic towards their own assets. “It’s going to put a lot of stress on new capacity such as Ka-, Ku- and X-band on the commercial side but even more so on Ka- and X-band on the military side.” The higher Ka-band frequency spectrum offers many advantages, including a smaller beam width, which enables smaller footprints and creates the opportunity for considerable frequency reuse and much higher power.

Commercial satellite players, too, are increasing by orders of magnitude their bandwidth reach with multi-band, next-generation constellations launching in the next few years. Inmarsat in August announced its own $1.2 billion investment in a next-generation Ka-band satellite network. The I-5 constellation will offer significant capability for military defense and civil government as well for disaster response, says Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, president, Inmarsat Government Services Inc. “Our single largest user today is the [Department of Defense] and that’s across the different services, the combatant commanders as well as Special Forces,” says Cowen-Hirsch, adding that 40 percent of company’s satellite business serves government users. She does not anticipate that number changing once Inmarsat’s I-5 constellation launches. “The military remains an early adopter and a large consumer of bandwidth and capacity. We have them in mind as we develop our new system,” she says, adding that Inmarsat considers itself a complementary, not competing, capability to WGS. “More than 80 percent of the satellite communications capabilities provided to the military today come from commercial satellites. Even if that percentage were to shift over time, we have a stable set of expectations that commercial satcom will be in high demand along with the (government’s own) milsatcom capability.”

Inmarsat is not the only firm enhancing its broadband capabilities. Iridium plans to offer Ka-band service starting in 2015 when it begins placing its Iridium Next satellites, its second-generation constellation, into orbit. The new satellites will support data rates for users of up to 8 megbits per second on a global basis, especially at the North and South Poles, where Inmarsat cannot provide service. Nearer term, ViaSat plans to launch its all-Ka-band ViaSat-1 satellite in early 2011, while Hughes Communications continues to sign subscribers for its Jupiter system, scheduled to come online in 2012. Globally, Ka-band systems from Eutelsat Communications and Yahsat, are scheduled to be operational in 2011 — and virtually all of these systems intend to serve government and military users. In Europe, a first-ever jointly operated Italian and French defense satellite, Sicral-2, will launch in 2013. The multi-band constellation will use the military-assigned portion of Ka-band spectrum for a broadband satellite, called Athena-Fidus, to serve both nations’ military and civil-security forces.

I believe the bandwidth crunch for the military will continue well into 2020. It’s going to put a lot of stress on new capacity such as Ka-, Ku- and X-band on the commercial side but even more so on Ka- and X-band on the military side. — Rousseau, NSR.

The transition will take time, and many commercial players positioned to supply new ground equipment hope to benefit from the push toward Ka-band adoption. “It’s a promising market,” says David Cavossa, vice president of operations for CapRock Government Solutions, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Harris Corp. CapRock won the first and only Ka-band task order from the government in 2008 and currently is providing a commercial version of Ka-band services to the Department of Defense. The firm counts the Marines among its biggest customers, and works through X-band and Ka-band operators, XTAR, Paradigm, Yahsat and Hispasat. “We think that WGS will act as a primer for both Ka-band and X-band on the commercial side. Since WGS will have all this Ka-band and X-band available, that will drive a lot of military government users to buy Ka-band and X-band terminals,” Cavossa says.

NSR estimates that the Ka-band market for communications-on-the-move systems will be as high as $100 million for aeronautical equipment by the end of 2019, and about $110 million for UAVs by the end of 2018. Rousseau predicts that military UAV system purchasers likely will use a combination of commercial and military systems, since the latter offers encryption and protected communications features. In addition, commercial Ka-band systems supporting communications-on-the-pause will generate almost $50 million by the end of 2018, but a vast majority of users of these systems likely also will be deployed over military satellites, Rousseau says.

Both Army and Air Force officials remain upbeat by WGS’s promise and the growing satcom capabilities that will benefit warfighters requiring ever-greater agility. The two branches share responsibility for the WGS constellation — the Air Force controls WGS satellite platforms, while the U.S. Army manages the communications payloads and warfighter transmissions from wideband satcom operations centers around the world. 

WGS Ups Capacity Compared with DSCS

“Army requirements continue to morph into smaller, faster and lighter capability. WGS has a 400 percent increase in bandwidth capacity over our prior constellation. That’s raw capacity — not to mention spatial reuse and lot of other capabilities this satellite has,” says Rick Dunnegan, team leader for SATCIN Developmental Systems in the U.S. Army’s Space & Terrestrial Communications directorate, CERDEC. “The satellite is very, very flexible. We have the ability to shift users from beam to beam on a digital backbone.” The WGS system, which also includes X-band connectivity, provides users significantly greater precision to manage and move resources around — compared with the satellites on WGS’ predecessor, the DSCS constellation, were “manageable down to 10 percent- to 15 percent-sized elements, whereas WGS can be managed down to 1 percent,” Dunnegan says. With countless Ku-band commercial users in the force today, “it’s going to take a while to migrate fully to WGS compatibility,” he says.

WGS’s increased power also allows mobile forces to use more compact equipment to connect with the satellites. For example, communications links previously supported through large, truck-mounted antennas now can be accomplished with terminals that can be transported in suitcases and assembled quickly in the field by soldiers, according to Boeing’s Web site. The company announced Aug. 2 that the third Boeing-built WGS satellite has launched, and three more WGS satellites are scheduled for launch in 2012 and 2013, with the potential for as many as six more to follow those assets into space. In August, the Air Force issued Boeing a $182 million contract to build WGS-7.

Dunnegan, who is focused on getting as many users off leased commercial bandwidth and over to Ka-band as possible, predicts that some of the commercial assets currently used for Ku-band will not make the transition because they will not be efficient enough to meet the stringent requirements of WGS. Efficiently designed terminals that use the most minimal resources on the satellite will ensure more availability. “Migrating efforts are definitely on the table,” he says, noting that project managers in the acquisition world have a “tough job. Do they upgrade their equipment that they’re supporting or do they acquire new equipment?”

CapRock Government Solutions, which has a handful of customers using Ka-band terminals, is seeing significant interest in Ka-band to support military UAV programs, which require smaller terminals and very fast data rates. Many of these users, says Cavossa, “know that they won’t get access to the WGS satellites so they are looking for commercial alternatives.” 

New Ka-band Satcom Link for Global Hawk

The Air Force is engaging industry to find ways to increase the capabilities of its current satellite assets, WGS and Advanced EHF satellites and to respond to a push from combat commanders for more data throughput, particularly on the Global Hawk platform. (The first Advanced EHF satellite was placed into orbit in August, but a problem with the main engine on the spacecraft left the satellite short of its intended orbit. Rescue plans using the satellite’s thrusters will put the satellite into the proper orbit but nearly a year behind schedule, according to the Air Force.)

All the services are moving toward terminals that provide multi-band capability. With WGS, being able to provide increased capability is just a matter of getting the terminals deployed,” says Col. Michael Lakos, milsatcom command lead for Air Force Space Command, who expressed some irony over the fact that terminal development often lags behind the launch of next-generation satellites. Lakos’ command oversees the Pentagon’s High Data Rate-Airborne Terminal (HDR-AT) program and in August held an Industry Day attended by 35 companies as part of the government’s market research into identifying alternatives for getting higher data rates from newly installed state-of the-art intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sensors on the Global Hawk UAV. The discussions, according to Lakos and his deputy director, Joanne Schissel, were “very fruitful and, I think, beneficial to the government as well as industry.” A decision is expected in 2011 to move forward with development of a high-capacity satcom link for blocks 30 and 40 of Global Hawk. This link will support newly installed airborne sensor packages using WGS Ka-band communications with data rates approaching 300 megabits per second. “This analysis of alternatives is looking at the modems on board, the different waveforms and at the antenna chain used to support the higher satcom data rates and how we can better exploit that. We are looking to increase the data stream and the amounts of data that can be pushed down to the ground,” he says. In addition to focusing on the second phase of Global Hawk UAV satcom capabilities, Air Force Space Command will examine ways to enhance broadband capacity on other air mobility platforms ranging from the tanker aircraft to aircraft that support national leadership.

Looking forward, both commercial and military players agree there is no end in sight for the military’s thirst for broadband and opportunities to keep pace with that growth. While Lakos does not see government supporting the launch of super satellites on the scale of the cancelled TSAT program, he does envision continued investments in current programs that increase the capability of the warfighter. In the next five years, Cavossa foresees government using more X-band and Ka-band communications and also anticipates that as WGS capacity is filled, “government users will have no choice but to go to commercial Ka-band and commercial X-band” sources. 

DISA’s New Acquisition Process

Bennett believes that over the next few years, the growth in the magnitude of capability delivered to the warfighter at lower cost will be dramatic: “Right now I am delivering about 8 GB and I expect to deliver 16 GB in another couple of years, and that 16 GB will be cheaper than what I pay for 8 GB today,” he says. Changes in satcom are evolving so fast that Bennett has revamped the Pentagon acquisition process to remove previous limitations placed on how satcom was purchased. “In the past we brought strictly transponders. Now, we’re buying transponders, services and turnkey operations, and we’re doing it across a schedule that is vastly unlimited by the number of people we can support,” Bennett says. He believes the dramatic process changes implemented in the satcom acquisition area signal to industry that it can be “the innovation lead. I’m sitting here, waiting. Now wow me.”