Latin American ISP StarGroup Chooses Hughes for Major Service Expansion

Germantown, Md. — Hughes Network Systems, LLC (Hughes), the global leader in broadband satellite solutions and services, today announced that Mexico-based service provider StarGroup has chosen Hughes and its award-winning JUPITER^™ System as the foundation for its soon-to-be-launched high-speed satellite Internet service in Latin America. The contract calls for Hughes to supply a JUPITER gateway, high-performance Ka-band terminals and a comprehensive suite of managed services for operational and customer support. As part of the initiative, StarGroup has leased a significant portion of the Mexico capacity on EchoStar XIX, scheduled for launch in late 2016, to expand its satellite service offerings in that country. Overall, the combined value of the agreements is in excess of US$200 million.

Under the initial agreement, Hughes will install a JUPITER gateway in the city of Arica, Chile, and manage the gateway for StarGroup remotely from its Network Operations Center (NOC) in Germantown, Maryland. The JUPITER System’s flexible configuration management and application programming interfaces (APIs) will enable rapid integration with StarGroup’s existing financial and customer support systems.

“The JUPITER System’s versatility and performance, backed by Hughes managed services for operational and customer support, will enable us to extend high-speed satellite Internet connectivity throughout our service area,” said Julio Di-Bella, CEO of StarGroup. “That includes some of the most inaccessible mountain regions of Mexico and the Andean nations.”

Under the managed services agreement, Hughes will provide StarGroup with virtual network operator (VNO) access to capacity over EchoStar XIX satellite’s coverage in Mexico. The JUPITER System’s VNO capabilities will enable StarGroup to effectively create and manage a range of budget-friendly service plans for its subscriber base, with Hughes providing tier two and tier three call center support, freeing StarGroup to focus its efforts on sales and marketing.

“This contract with StarGroup further solidifies JUPITER as the high-throughput satellite ground system of choice in Latin America and by leading operators around the globe,” said Ramesh Ramaswamy, vice president, International Sales & Marketing for Hughes. “Our comprehensive suite of managed operational and customer support services—all proven and backed by Hughes—will ensure StarGroup’s success in offering innovative and high-performance service plans to maximize broadband penetration across their region.”

Featuring a flexible and robust gateway architecture with lights-out operation, enhanced IPoS air interface for bandwidth efficiency, and high-throughput terminals, the JUPITER System enables operators to achieve the highest possible capacity and efficiency for any satellite broadband implementation. Its foundational technology is the powerful JUPITER System on a Chip (SoC), a custom-designed VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) processor employing a multi-core architecture and enabling more than 100 Mbps of throughput on every terminal in the JUPITER family.