As I begin my tenure as president of Intelsat General I plan to continue our leadership role in bringing value to the government customer, and in particular, helping the U.S. government make better use of commercial satellite resources and investment. This means I will continue to execute on many of the priorities that our leadership team laid out a year or more ago, and reaffirmed early this year.
In helping our customers make the best use of commercial capabilities and technology, we are focusing on three main priorities for this year. The first is providing our government and commercial customers with the best suite of secure and advanced solutions available for mobile communications in the air, at sea and on land.
The second is to show U.S. Government stakeholders-particularly within the U.S. Air Force-how they can benefit by utilizing Intelsat experts to operate the government's own satellite flight and ground networks-most notably WGS and the Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN).
As many of you already know, Intelsat very literally created the commercial SATCOM industry, and thereby set the gold standard for satellite operations. The third priority is to help the United States maintain superiority in space by participating in the development of a more resilient wideband space architecture by including commercial capabilities in all long-term SATCOM plans.
A number of initiatives are underway to support a new era of highly advanced sensors in mobile communications. The most significant of these is the generation of Intelsat EpicNG satellites.
The first Intelsat EpicNG satellite, IS-29e, launched in January, and the second, IS-33e, will launch in August with coverage over the Middle East and Africa. A key feature of the EpicNG spacecraft is the digital payload technology, first developed by The Boeing Company for use on the DoD's WGS satellites. EpicNG satellites incorporate the most advanced digital payload commercially available and enable significant increases in throughput per MHz utilizing antennas as small as 12 inches.
The digital payload also provides added security and anti-jam features much in demand by our government and commercial customers. Intelsat EpicNG spot beams limit the area from which a jammer can be effective.
With the onboard digital payload, jammers can be detected and stopped at the satellite, thus preventing them from polluting the satellite's downlink. In addition, desired carriers can be re-tuned to avoid the jammer and the onboard digital payload re-configured so the desired carrier still arrives at its destination at the original downlink frequency
The U.S. Air Force recently participated in IGC and L-3 Communications-led tests that validated the protected tactical waveform (PTW) modem performance over existing satellites with plans to re-validate the results over the Intelsat EpicNG platform.
Several of our customers are anxious to test performance, PTW and other protected communication features on Intelsat EpicNG IS-29e, which has a footprint over the Americas, the North Atlantic and Europe. These customers want to test satellite throughput with various antenna sizes, including those used by remotely piloted aircraft like the Predator, on the smaller Class 3 RPAs, and on small ground terminals for mobile communications.
Intelsat has partnered with two flat-panel antenna developers, Kymeta and Phasor, whose products are well suited to mobile applications and the Intelsat EpicNG platform. We plan to begin testing these antennas for our customers on IS-29 for aero, maritime and ground operations.
In the area of assisting the U.S. Air Force with the flight and ground operations of its current wideband WGS satellites, the government has signaled its intention to take on a two-phased approach.
The initial phase involves swapping out AF personnel for commercial personnel for the operation of their satellites from their satellite operations center (SOC) at Schriever AFB. In the second phase, we expect the service would contract with a commercial company to operate the WGS constellation in orbit using commercial teleports. The Air Force is expected to release a draft request for proposal sometime this summer.
Last, but certainly not least, the upcoming Air Force Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) for wideband satellite communications will determine whether the service continues to launch and fly its own dedicated wideband satellite fleet, or it turns to commercial companies to provide communications capacity for the majority of its SATCOM needs, or something in between.
IGC expects to be part of a broad industry engagement to support the DoD in this AoA so that our individual and collective capabilities can be "designed in" to the Space Enterprise Vision as envisioned by General John Hyten, Commander of AFSPC.
Via this process, the DoD will be able to clearly see how the satellite technology being developed by Intelsat and other commercial companies can best support the U.S. military mission.
I look forward to leading the Intelsat General team as our fleet and capabilities evolve with the kinds of features and functionality that our commercial and government customers need to achieve mission success, however that is defined.
