ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. military wants to turn its satellite communications into something that works like the internet — fluid, fast, and built on seamless interoperability between networks. But at an industry conference this week, Pentagon officials said the long envisioned military space internet is still a long way off.
In an era where commercial satellites outnumber military ones, the Defense Department is trying to tap into this diverse ecosystem, defense officials said June 17 at the SAE Media Group’s MilSatcom USA conference.
The goal is creating what DoD calls “enterprise satcom” — a virtualized, software-defined network that could automatically reroute communications between military, commercial and allied nations’ satellites if an adversary jams one satellite system.
But the reality today is an ecosystem full of manual processes, hardware silos and incompatible standards.
When you travel internationally, your iPhone doesn’t need different hardware to connect to local cell networks. That’s thanks to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a global collaboration that created unified technical standards for mobile networks decades ago.
Satellite communications have no such standard. “The question always comes up: If DoD wants this ecosystem where users could roam across service provider networks, would we make that work?” said Mike Dean, director of command, control and communications infrastructure at the Defense Department. The answer is that a technical standard is needed comparable to the 3GPP.
Dean hopes the satellite industry will have its own “3GPP moment,” but so far, that moment hasn’t arrived. The commercial satellite industry remains fragmented, with each company developing proprietary technologies that don’t play well with others. As Rajeev Gopal, vice president of Hughes Network Systems, put it: “Can I take a OneWeb modem and replace it with an Amazon Kuiper modem? I do not…
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