Innovations at Hughes Communications India: Supporting the Quest of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Mission’ | 2021

Shilpa Choudhury | Marketing Manager | Hughes Communications India

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In India, the COVID-19 pandemic has expedited technology innovation while also ensuring business continuity. Thanks to enormous investment in new technologies, regulatory support, and accelerated growth and adoption of digital solutions, India has emerged as a global technology landscape leader. As per Harvard University scholars, "India is leapfrogging into the Fourth Industrial Revolution." It's remarkable to see how the Indian government is actively encouraging leapfrogging into the fourth industrial revolution. The government's flagship program, Digital India, is transforming the country into a digitally enabled society and knowledge economy. Furthermore, Industry 4.0 has vast potential to catalyze and support inclusive and long-term industrial development. Given India's emphasis on Make in India, we must adopt innovative and sustainable methods and techniques.

As a part of our effort to support the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat, Hughes Communications India has innovated its product range across satellite, wireless, and SD-WAN domains. Understanding the unique needs of customers in India and developing solutions that best meet those needs, we have constantly focused on research. We have deployed these products in various projects across banking, government, defense, education, and retail segments. Our Managed Service portfolio that includes the award-winning HughesON platform provides smooth connectivity operations and helps businesses with a single pane of glass visibility of their network, applications, individual sites, and every network device. These innovations include:

JUPITER™ System: Hughes' JUPITER™ System is a next-generation very small aperture terminal (VSAT) platform for high-throughput and traditional satellite broadband services. With a single stream DVB-S2X wideband forward channel, it is the world's most advanced VSAT platform. In addition to the JUPITER VSAT Ground system, Hughes has its own JUPITER world-class HTS and VHTS satellites. JUPITER enables operators to achieve the highest possible capacity and efficiency for any satellite broadband implementation owing to its flexible and robust gateway architecture with lights-out operation, enhanced IPoS air interface for bandwidth efficiency and performance, and high-throughput terminals. The JUPITER System on a Chip (SoC) is the foundational technology, a custom-designed VLSI processor with a multi-core architecture that enables 300 Mbps speed on every JUPITER terminal. The JUPITER System is well-suited to broadband satellite applications, which range from home internet to in-flight wifi. With this technology, we enabled high-speed satellite connectivity to 5,000 remote gram panchayats using capacity from ISRO's GSAT-19 and GSAT-11 satellites for the Bharatnet project. It is part of the government's flagship BharatNet program, which aims to connect all 250,000 gram panchayats in India to the internet.
HughesON SD-WAN: SD-WAN, or software-defined wide-area network, is a type of wide-area network that employs software to manage and control connectivity, management, and services between data centers and branch offices or cloud instances. A WAN (wide-area network) typical function was to connect users at a branch or site to applications located on data center servers. Before routing to internet cloud applications, all traffic is routed through data centers, resulting in increased costs, bandwidth inefficiencies, increased latency, and poor application quality of experience. However, in today's cloud-centric environment, this setup is ineffective.

On the other hand, SD-WAN comes into play to meet the issues of a quickly changing business environment and digital transformation. This technology is more adaptable and effective at supporting a distributed and mobile workforce by connecting all devices to a set of network services and monitoring the availability and performance of each of these services. With encrypted network traffic, network segmentation, a central provisioning system, enhanced visibility into the WAN, and overall network performance optimization, SD-WAN offers considerable benefits in terms of network security. SD-WAN managed services are expanding quickly and gaining acceptance as an alternative to legacy network services as businesses throughout India embrace the digital revolution and strive to improve and modernize their corporate networks. Furthermore, COVID-19 has placed a stronger emphasis on the development of more secure remote connectivity solutions. Remote working, increased use of video platforms, and IoT introduction are all driving up demand on business-critical networks.

HM Systems: Based on the software-definable modem (SDM) technology and the Hughes scrambled code multiple access (SCMA) waveform, the HM system provides cost-effective, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) communications products and solutions that are appropriate for government applications. The HM System is a commercially-based, open-standards architecture and frequency band-agnostic platform to provide government users with inexpensive, dependable solutions that meet a wide range of mobility and portability needs. The HM System can now offer worldwide satellite-on-the-move capabilities for airborne, maritime, and land-mobile platforms, owing to installing the first gateway in September 2015.
In Flight & Maritime Connectivity: As the first recipient of Flight and Maritime Connectivity (FMC) license from the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, Hughes Communications India also provides inflight connectivity and high-quality broadband services to Indian and foreign airlines and shipping companies operating within Indian territory. HCI pays spectrum charges depending on revenue generated by these services, which are offered via satellites as well as telecom networks on the ground. In India, we provide FMC services using domestic and foreign satellites approved by the Department of Space.

Being a consistent supporter and contributor of the Make in India campaign, Hughes Communications India is focusing its efforts on meeting the specific connectivity needs of both individuals and enterprises. With businesses adopting a remote work ethic post-pandemic, there is a growing need for our products, services, and solutions. We mix the finest of satellite, wireless, and terrestrial technologies to provide businesses and governments with innovative & distinctive connectivity solutions. With our company flourishing in numerous ways, we are pretty optimistic about the future. There are a few interesting new projects on the horizon based upon Mobility, SD-WAN, Cloud access, 4G and wifi backhauling, and IoT. Additionally, the pandemic has drawn attention to vulnerabilities in residential broadband infrastructure. As we grow, we'll want to give consumer broadband via satellite, similar to how DTH brought satellite to India's mass consumer market via television.