Increased Mobility Needed for Satcom Integration
NEW YORK -- The satellite industry should concentrate on improving spot-beam technologies and the reuse of spectrum as it seeks to integrate the communications it provides with the global information grid that the military uses for much of its mobile communications, Charles Woodson, the chief information officer of the U.S. Space and Missile Defense Command’s satcom division, said on a SatCon conference panel Wednesday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Increasing ease-of-use on the ground should also be a goal of the industry’s engineers, because soldiers untrained in communications are likely to be using the technology, Woodson said.
The flexibility and mobility of satellite communications must improve to increase its part in the information grid, said Col. Edward Eidson, the training and doctrine command capability manager for networks and services at the U.S. Army Signal Center. On-the-move combat platforms that are “lighter, faster, cheaper and can handle more bits per hertz” are needed to make satellite communications more useful, he said.
“We need to be able to deploy anywhere in the world and be able to fight upon arrival,” Eidson said. “That means enroute planning. … Once they get there, we should give them the operational flexibility they need.” More-efficient modems are also in demand, because data traffic often overwhelms processors, he said.
Business and the military must keep working together to achieve a “common standard” and successful integration, said Tracy Allison, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s chief of transformational communications engineering. The eventual goal is to allow commanders to control their communications well enough to gain “full awareness,” he said.
The military will continue to provide more information to the private sector to help it develop better and more- detailed business plans, said Rear Adm. Janice Hamby, the vice director of C4 systems for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.