Hughes announces high-speed satellite internet service with Isro

As reported by Mint on 22 March, the company was planning to roll out the service by April this year. “We will start offering satellite internet aimed at MSMEs (micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises). We’re targeting the entire east and north-east India, and the hilly areas of Himachal, Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir, and so on,” Shivaji Chatterjee, senior vice-president of Hughes Communications India, told Mint earlier this year.

He also said that the initial HTS broadband service will begin with internet speeds of between 2-10 Mbps. However, Hughes is yet to confirm what bandwidth and target areas would its now-launched service cater to.

HTS refers to satellite connectivity that offers a higher bandwidth — which in turn increases the amount of data that can be transferred between a satellite and a ground station. Typical satellite connectivity has seen high latency of connectivity, which refers to the time taken between a set of data to be transferred between a sender and a receiver. Latency, and not bandwidth, is what users usually perceive as ‘internet speed’.

Satellite connections also have low bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred between a sender and a receiver, every second. On satellite connections, this has typically always translated to download and upload speeds that are less than one megabyte per second — which new generation connections can help change. Pranav Roach, president of Hughes Network Systems India, told Mint in February this year that high bandwidth satellites can bring gigabit-class connectivity to satellite networks as well — and the newly announced Hughes HTS network is a precursor to the same.

HTS satellites seek to improve this, and therefore bring satellite-based internet connectivity closer to the standard of terrestrial internet networks. While the latter typically offer lower latencies and higher bandwidth, laying down physical connectivity through optical fiber could be difficult in tricky terrain areas — such as the ones that Chatterjee had highlighted.

In 2018, ISRO launched GSAT-11 and GSAT-29 with the aim of offering higher bandwidth satellite connectivity to Indian clients in the enterprise space. Following the launch of the GSAT-11 in December 2018, erstwhile ISRO chairman, K. Sivan, said at a press conference that the satellite is capable of offering peak data bandwidth of 14 Gbps through satellite networks.

While both GSAT-11 and GSAT-29 satellites carry transponders (instruments that relay the data from the satellites) in both Ku-band and Ka-band frequencies, the Hughes HTS service will use only the Ku-band for the high bandwidth data transfers.

Hughes did not respond to queries on whether it has already signed clients for its high-speed satellite internet service in India at the time of writing, or by what margin does the new service improve Hughes’ existing satellite broadband service in the country.

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