In Short:
EchoStar announced contract extension with DoD for standalone 5G networks at military bases in Hawaii and Washington. Hughes, a subsidiary of EchoStar, leads the deployment. Benefits include improved base operations and aircraft readiness. The deployment at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island was completed with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in March 2023. EchoStar also won a grant to build an Open RAN test center.
American company EchoStar announced this week that the Department of Defense (DoD) Office has extended its contract for the continued deployment of standalone 5G networks at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (JBPHH) in Hawaii and at the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island (NASWI) in Washington State. The contract extension builds on the award for NASWI in 2021 and additional expansion in Hawaii in 2022, extending both through 2025 with additional 5G enhancements, EchoStar said.
Hughes’s Role in Deployment
EchoStar subsidiary Hughes spearheads the deployments as the prime contractor, integrating standards-based, best-of-breed components, such as radio access, edge cloud, and a packet processing core, with Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and seamless, global satellite connectivity augmented by embedded Network Operations Capabilities (NOC) and Security Operations Capabilities (SOC), the company said.
Benefits of 5G Deployment
“The award extension demonstrates the value of this multi-vendor solution and follows the successful launch of the 5G network at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island – the first 5G ORAN at a US DoD base,” said Hughes. “Together, the NASWI and Hawaii site configurations demonstrate the power of 5G standalone ORAN networks to support increasingly automated base operations, securely and with the resilience necessary to maintain information assurance in any circumstance – holding tremendous promise for DoD applications.”
Reportedly, the initial NASWI deployment was completed with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 30, 2023. The deployment improves aircraft readiness by enabling immediate, real-time communication coordination across the flight line to reduce maintenance time and decrease preparation time between missions.
Open RAN
As reported by TelecomTalk, EchoStar recently won a USD 50 million NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) grant to build an Open RAN test center.
