By Adrian Morris, Executive Vice President of Engineering

Innovation starts and ends with talented people. In August, as Hughes held its fourth annual Engineering Day to celebrate and recognize technology achievements at Hughes, that talent was very much in evidence. The engineering charter at Hughes is to develop innovative products, platforms, systems, and services to enable us to advance our leadership position in satellite and wireless communications worldwide. To do that we need to continue our long tradition of employing—and nurturing—the best people.

That’s why we place a special emphasis on developing engineers at Hughes. Our mentoring program for new college graduates, for example, is an important part of an ongoing strategy to ensure that the next generation of engineers is well equipped to develop innovative products and services that enable the next generation of broadband.

Many of our engineering staff are pursuing post-graduate education programs. We match up junior engineers one-on-one with senior engineers, and also provide specialized training for technical managers and senior engineers to help them continue to grow individually and to grow the organization as a whole.  The interaction and teamwork between engineering and marketing, sales, program, quality, and operations groups is a vital part of helping to ensure engineers stay in touch with our customers and the emerging technologies in the marketplace. In addition, there is a continued emphasis on new inventions and patents. 

Ku-band to Ka-band

For over 25 years, Hughes has been the market leader in satellite networking technologies and products, most of which were based in Ku-band. With the recent emergence of Ka-band systems, there’s no better evidence of Hughes technology talent and leadership than the roaring success of our award-winning SPACEWAY^® 3 satellite. In less than 3 years since service was launched in April 2008, the world’s first satellite with onboard switching and routing is already serving over 60 percent of the 558,000 HughesNet consumer subscribers in North America—and counting.

Mobility

In Mobile Satellite Systems, the Hughes-developed GMR1-3G standard continues to be the solution of choice for major operators around the world, and is employed in leading-edge systems and products at both L-band and S-band. Talent and innovation are also apparent in our achievements in the emerging aeronautical broadband communications marketplace. Hughes provided Row44^® with the broadband satellite systems and services that this year enabled Southwest Airlines to offer passengers high-speed Web browsing, email, text messaging, and video services onboard using their Wi-Fi-enabled cellphones, PDAs, and laptop computers.

Networking for the Enterprise Market

To leverage the greatest value from our customers’ enterprise networks, we have been working on technology to enable their applications to operate at peak performance. For example, WAN optimization technology accelerates a broad range of business applications over the network by eliminating redundant transmissions, staging data in local caches such as hard drives, compressing and prioritizing data, and streamlining chatty protocols. These processes derive greater throughput and improve performance over the existing bandwidth. As a result, enterprises realize improved application performance, easier migration to cloud-based services and virtualization—and ultimately better ROI.

Adaptive QOS (quality of service) is a relatively recent technique in networking, which enables the network to adapt the available transport to the immediate load demand of services such as voice, video, and Web browsing over the same transport. In satellite communications, Hughes has been an early leader in adaptive inroute selection and adaptive coding and modulation on outroute channels, and most recently intelligent Adaptive QOS over xDSL circuits.

A New Class of Chips

The tiny device known as an integrated circuit, or chip, that sits inside every Hughes product making it do what it does is another tangible result of Hughes talent. We continue to develop sub-micron VLSI chipsets, and starting this year we are rolling out a new class of chips with embedded high-performance processors and custom circuits. Their capabilities will translate to considerably higher end user performance at an equivalent cost to today’s technology and products. 

The Road Ahead

Next up is JUPITER™, our Ka-band high-throughput satellite system, which is designed to carry over 100 Gbps of traffic—more than 100 times that of conventional Ku-band satellites. I’m happy to report that engineering development is on schedule for JUPITER to be launched during the first half of 2012.  JUPITER’s bent-pipe, multi-spot beam design will serve over 1.5 million HughesNet subscribers across the U.S. and Canada at very high throughputs—up to 25 Mbps, for fiber-like speeds. It will further ensure our leadership in the consumer marketplace by providing the capabilities required for emerging Web applications that demand more bandwidth to individual users.

JUPITER utilizes an enhanced version of the Hughes-developed IPoS standard, the world’s leading broadband satellite standard approved by ETSI, TIA, and ITU. The wider bandwidth data pipes required by JUPITER demand advances across virtually all of our technology disciplines: from RF/microwave design and high-speed digital signal processing/VLSI components, to embedded software, network management and back-office systems—for both fixed and mobile broadband applications. 

As in the past, we’re always looking forward—to future technologies and products needed to serve a rapidly expanding consumer marketplace, and the ever-increasing demands for higher capacity as newer applications emerge alongside the wireless path to 4G/5G. There are also emerging opportunities for innovative offerings in the enterprise, government, and small/medium business markets.

With our remarkably talented engineering, operations, manufacturing, program, and quality teams, the Hughes technology heritage of almost 40 years remains in good standing, positioning Hughes well to embrace those opportunities and to develop and deliver the game-winning broadband products and services of the future.