Senior officials at satellite communications (satcom) provider Viasat are drilling down into efforts to support development of the US Army's plans for satcom on-the-move capabilities, which service officials have tagged as a critical requirement for its Integrated Tactical Network (ITN)
Company officials have begun “actively working partnerships” with other commercial satcom providers to gain low Earth orbit (LEO) and mid Earth orbit (MEO) capabilities, to support army-led efforts for the ITN mobile satcom initiative. Development of satcom on the move capability, as well as LEO and MEO integration are technology lynchpins for the ITN variant known as Capability Set 23 (CS23).
Developing and fielding a viable mobile satcom capability “is more than just the simple things, like beam transition, terrestrial routing, and how you manage the transition or the buffering, how you manage the routing”, said Viasat's president of Government Systems Craig Miller. “The army sets up itself where they set up the gateways, the hubs, and their own terminals, and they lease transponder bandwidth. Mobility is sort of a tricky problem when you have a static network like that,” he told Janes.
Viasat's NetAgility bounding router transmitting video operates over multiple radio systems at the US Army CyberQuest 2020 exercise. (Viasat )
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