A Hughes-OneWeb prototype community at Thule, Greenland, is quick sufficient to allow video conferencing, streaming video and video games
WASHINGTON — U.S. troops at Thule Air Base, Greenland, a distant army outpost nicely outdoors the footprint of a typical geostationary satellite tv for pc, are getting high-speed web from OneWeb’s polar-orbiting constellation.
Hughes Community Methods and OneWeb introduced June 22 that they’ve efficiently deployed a prototype low Earth orbit community at Thule, quick sufficient to allow video conferencing, streaming video and interactive video games.
The community helps about 600 service members dwelling on the base. One latest night, about 100 army personnel at Thule “have been on-line concurrently, consuming near a terabyte of connectivity,” Hughes stated in a information launch.
Thule Air Base is house to U.S. army items that conduct missile warning, house monitoring, and satellite tv for pc command-and-control operations. The Hughes-OneWeb demonstration is important as high-speed web connectivity within the Arctic area is tough to come back by. For many years, Iridium Communications has been the one operator in a position to present steady protection over the poles — and just for much less bandwidth-hungry providers equivalent to cellular telephony and varied monitoring and monitoring functions.
Hughes and OneWeb are working below a $3.4 million contract from the Air Power Analysis Laboratory. AFRL oversees the U.S. Air Power’s Protection Experimentation Utilizing the Business House Web (DEUCSI) program. Hughes, the prime contractor on the Thule venture, is a OneWeb investor and is supplying parts of the bottom phase.
Constructed within the Fifties, Thule is the northernmost U.S. army set up, positioned lower than 1,000 miles from the North Pole.
“The testing has demonstrated the flexibility of rising LEO networks to dramatically enhance communications to areas which have historically been extraordinarily troublesome to serve,” stated AFRL program supervisor Brian Beal. “The residents at Thule have been thrilled with each the efficiency and stability of the community as they’ve used it to attach with household, buddies, and colleagues world wide.”
Hughes stated the Thule LEO community contains 4 antennas connecting with the OneWeb satellites that orbit overhead, delivering about 14 terabytes of knowledge per thirty days.
