In September, SES announced that it entered into a contract agreement to provide MEO Global Services (mGS) through its second-generation Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation, O3b mPOWER, to NATO. The mGS contract is designed to provide bulk MEO capacity that will enable resilient, critical SATCOM services for the government and military operations of participating nations.
Through the contract, end-users will also have the option to leverage commercial SATCOM as a managed service (SaaMS) capabilities through SES or sovereign network services created and operated independently by participating governments.
Government Satellite Report (GSR): What is LuxMEO and mGS? What is this program about?
Gus Anderson: LuxMEO is a U.S. government term for the mGS contract because the government understood this contract to be a partnership among long-time allies — the United States, Luxembourg, and NATO — to make secure, resilient, broadband O3b mPOWER MEO satellite capacity available to all NATO members. The contract has been many years in the making and was awarded to SES by the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) on September 2nd.
“Because the constellation is in MEO, we need fewer satellites for continuous global coverage. We have already launched eight of these satellites, with an additional five satellites to be launched.” – Gus Anderson
The program is designed to provide bulk O3b mPOWER capacity to any NATO member. Currently, Luxembourg and the U.S. have signed up for a collective 10 gigabits per second which they can use to support national and multi-national defense and national security missions.
GSR: What satellite technologies, operational capabilities, and service agreements fall under the mGS contract?
Gus Anderson: MEO services under the contract can be activated anywhere globally between 48 degrees north and 48 degrees south. The satellite technology behind the contract is the O3b mPOWER constellation. Because the constellation is in MEO, we need fewer satellites for continuous global coverage. We have already launched eight of these satellites, with an additional five satellites to be launched.
There are two types of services available to mGS users: commercial managed services and sovereign services.
The commercial managed services make use of our existing commercial gateways for fast activation. These services use SES hubs at the SES commercial gateways and will need to use a particular set of SES-issued terminals and equipment that have been certified to be O3b mPOWER-ready on the remote end-user side of a network.
The other mGS terrestrial service available is sovereign services, which enable end-users to establish their own gateways at any location and utilize their own equipment – essentially creating their own wholly proprietary government networks using O3b mPOWER capacity. As a trusted provider to NATO and allied governments, SES Space & Defense can provide technical assistance to governments wanting to create such sovereign networks.
In addition, mGS offers a hybrid sovereign solution, whereby participating nations can deploy co-locate proprietary equipment at SES’s commercial gateways to create their own secure networks using the existing antenna infrastructure at SES’s commercial gateways.
The most important point of this is that the O3b mPOWER infrastructure is designed to be agnostic to equipment, meaning end-users, participating nations, and all the customers who are going to use the mGS contract can bring their own equipment to this network, subject to some basic certifications to ensure that their technology will be compatible with O3b mPOWER.
“NATO and the participating nations are pre-purchasing bandwidth capacity on O3b mPOWER that will then be used by their nations and the mission partners.” – Gus Anderson
To that end, we have our own government technology certification (GTC) program, and we are already running select equipment through this program. We’ve been approached by end-users, especially inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), who have modems and terminal equipment they’re interested in using with O3b mPOWER. We are working closely with the manufacturers to ensure the equipment is prepared for the GTC process.
GSR: How will this contract change SATCOM for NATO?
Gus Anderson: The most important piece of this contract is the bulk capacity purchase. NATO and the participating nations are pre-purchasing bandwidth capacity on O3b mPOWER that will then be used by their nations and the mission partners.
This contract construct allows an end-user to simply activate bandwidth already on a purchase order, accelerating the government’s access to O3b mPOWER. Everyone knows that the acquisition process could often take months, so we’re looking at being able to activate bandwidth initially in a matter of weeks. As we improve and automate the process, we expect bandwidth activation time to be reduced to days, even hours.