Hughes Activates First Customer for SPACEWAY 3 Broadband Service

Hughes Network Systems announced this week it successfully activated the first HughesNet customer subscriber for broadband Internet service using the SPACEWAY 3 Ka-band satellite. SPACEWAY 3 has a gross capacity of 10 gigabits per second, which Hughes claims makes it the “highest traffic-carrying satellite to be brought into service in North America.”

Pradman Kaul, president and CEO of Hughes, commented, “With this significant milestone, our SPACEWAY 3 satellite has officially commenced carrying revenue-bearing traffic, making Hughes a fully integrated service provider. We are excited to begin delivering HughesNet broadband services over the world’s first commercial satellite with on-board switching to our rapidly growing base of consumer, SMB, enterprise and government customers throughout North America.”

In addition to on-board traffic switching and routing, SPACEWAY 3 employs advanced technologies such as dynamic beam forming and direct small-dish-to-small-dish connectivity.

Depending on pricing, SPACEWAY 3 could provide an inexpensive way to feed high quality IP-based video and audio from remote locations at higher data rates than lower frequency portable satellite communications systems, such as BGAN, without the need for large earth station antennas.

Doug Lung

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack.
A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.