ViaSat Inc. has been awarded a contract valued at over $7 million from Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems Inc. for satellite communications equipment for a coalition military network being installed in Iraq.
The network will use commercial satellites to provide secure voice and data services, plus voice-over-IP to integrate telephone and data on a common network, connecting coalition forces to each other and to the coalition backbone. The order is for a hub and 20 remote terminals.
This network is expected to give coalition forces access to new network- centric services that would otherwise only become available with the future launch of the Transformation Communication MILSATCOM (TCM) architecture. The coalition military network is designed to support over 1000 telephone lines as well as fast "cable modem-like" data access to the coalition Wide Area Network (WAN) backbone.
"We're excited about this opportunity to improve the communications infrastructure for the coalition forces with equipment that will help free up tactical signal soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq," said Marc Agnew, ViaSat's vice president of Government Broadband Systems.
"This is our second network for Iraq featuring an Internet Protocol (IP) bandwidth-on-demand capability that reduces satellite bandwidth requirements."
The bandwidth savings enabled by ViaSat Linkway and LinkStar satellite modems can significantly reduce the cost of leased commercial satellite bandwidth as compared to the Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) networks they replace.
Linkway and LinkStar VSATs include Dynamic Bandwidth Resource Allocation technology that shares bandwidth among remote stations and adjusts the size of the satellite channel to match data traffic. The work under this contract will be performed over the next 6 months at ViaSat's facilities in Carlsbad CA, Clarksburg MD, and Norcross GA.
