In February, COMSAT signed an agreement to be the exclusive Iridium Certus service provider for U.S. DoD users. This unique, long-term deal sees COMSAT provide Iridium’s secure global satellite broadband connectivity for mobile voice and data services to the DoD. Through the Service, U.S. government users will be able to cost effectively, and securely connect remote assets to respective command and control centers back on U.S. soil, from anywhere on the planet including Arctic and Antarctic regions.
COMSAT is working closely with Iridium’s network engineering tear and expects services to commence from our Certus POP in Tempe, AZ on July 1. This will be followed up with the establishment of the COMSAT POP at the DoD Gateway in Hawaii Q3 2019 supporting classified missions.
Through this contract COMSAT and SD envisage expansion of our classified network at the SD Data Center in Melbourne, FL enabling DoD users to leverage the broad range of value-added capabilities including Software as a Service (SaaS) that SD has built over the years.
Iridium Certus is a low earth orbit constellation where the average number of cross-linked satellite hops is four and the latency in any given connectivity session is as low as 100 milliseconds round trip, which is a substantial improvement when compared to geostationary systems. This opens Iridium Certus up to a range of latency dependent enterprise applications like video conferencing and secure voice calls.