International Turnkey Broadband Managed Services

Global credit card provider saves hundreds of thousands of dollars in network upgrade costs in Latin America with Satellite Broadband Network Services from Hughes Global Services.

One of the world’s largest multinational credit card companies has been able to expand its network of bank partners in Latin America and the Caribbean region while staving off costly broadband upgrades with the help of Hughes Network Systems, LLC (Hughes).

The company operates one of the world’s largest credit card payments network, providing consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments products and processing services—as well as having the largest ATM network—in more than 200 countries and territories. The company dominates in 26 Latin America/Caribbean countries thanks to its global payments technology that connects consumers, businesses, banks and governments, enabling them to use digital currency instead of cash and checks. The high-speed network is capable of handling more than 10,000 transactions per second with reliability, convenience and security.

Hughes provides a completely managed satellite network service connecting 116 banks to the company’s regional headquarters in Miami, Florida. The company first turned to Hughes to provide a satellite backup network for its primary terrestrial broadband network. Landlines aren’t always high-speed or reliable in developing economies due to inconsistent and often aging infrastructure and natural calamities. For instance, following the horrific Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Hughes satellite network was able to keep the banks operational, serving the population in crisis while it took weeks to restore the terrestrial network.

Satellite and Terrestrial Networks Share the Traffic Load

As the company continued to expand aggressively across the region, its data and application demands began to outstrip the capacity of the primary terrestrial network. The company faced a costly wide area network (WAN) upgrade to maintain an acceptable level of performance and to keep up with growth. Since the Hughes network performed exceptionally and reliably throughout its 10+ year tenure, the company instead decided to enlist the Hughes satellite network as a load balancing solution in addition to providing network redundancy to the existing terrestrial network, saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrade costs. The Hughes network load balances traffic between the terrestrial and satellite networks, breathing new life into the existing infrastructure and doubling the company’s available bandwidth.

High-Performance Network Carries Critical Applications

The network is based on the highly successful Hughes HX System, a high-performance satellite system optimized for carrier-grade IP broadband applications. It incorporates many advanced features pioneered by Hughes, including WAN optimization, to improve the performance of the banks’ high-bandwidth applications. The HX System incorporates many powerful IP routing features including VRRP with policy-based routing, which enables the remote VSAT to implement automatic WAN routing in the case of terrestrial link failure, as well as traffic balancing in the case of normal operations.

The network carries critical credit card processing data, pricing information and other back-office business data between the banks and the company’s regional headquarters. Reliability is essential to operations. Every minute the network is down could result in devastating loss of business and irate customers. Consequently, the disaster recovery, dual-path redundancy and load balancing created with the Hughes solution not only boosts performance but assures the network stays online.

Security is also critical for the company’s banking partners. With AES256 bit encryption, the HX System provides exceptional security for all mission-critical applications. For the most secure applications, the HX280 is FIPS Level 2-Certified, one of the most stringent security standards imposed by the US Government.

The multinational corporation relies on Hughes to manage the network from the customer’s network operations center (NOC) location in Atlanta, Georgia. A bilingual (Spanish-English) Hughes network engineer is dedicated to support and safeguard the credit card company’s network around the clock. Hughes proactively monitors the network, alerting the company and taking action before a circuit overloads. If equipment support is needed, trained support staff is on-site in less than four hours.

End-to-end Program Management

Hughes provides the customer with a convenient, easy-to-use network management system so they can have visibility into what is going on in their network. It provides efficient management and optimization of network performance through an intuitive, graphical interface to an advanced set of monitoring and diagnostic tools. The system presents a network dashboard view to quickly determine the current health of the network. With the click of a mouse, a technician can quickly evaluate and control virtually all aspects of the satellite network.

“We are bringing our advanced payment technology to Latin America to make consumers’ lives easier by allowing them to pay anytime, anywhere, and in a way that is both simple and convenient,” said a company spokesperson. “Hughes has been a reliable, trusted partner in helping us achieve that goal for more than decade. Hughes gives us a one-stop shop for everything we need in terms of network installation, management and field maintenance while providing unmatched network performance. The fact that we were able to tap our existing satellite backup network to solve our bandwidth problems saved us a ton of money and reaffirmed our confidence in Hughes.”