ViaSat has been awarded a contract for the supply of additional LinkWayS2 IP network modem system to the US Department of Defense (DoD) in an effort to upgrade its tactical communications infrastructure.
Under the $4.5m contract, the company will deliver an unspecified number of LinkWayS2 units to help replace the department’s existing LinkWay2100 series hardware, which has been in use since 2003.
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ViaSat Tactical SATCOM Networks general manager Bill Connelly said: "In numerous at-the-halt and on-the-move network demonstrations, LinkWayS2 has maintained its excellent latency and jitter performance in full mesh configurations at the industry’s highest MF-TDMA (multi-frequency, time division multiple access) throughput."
The system provides true network-centric connectivity by seamlessly integrating voice, video and data applications with enhanced operational flexibility compared with the hub-based satellite network systems.
Apart from direct terminal-to-terminal connections, LinkWayS2 also features a second demodulator to obtain simultaneous DVB-S2 broadcast or multicast traffic from global broadcast system (GBS) in-theatre transmitters.
Additional features include a DoD-approved transmission security (TRANSEC), increased transmission throughput, advanced modulation and forward error correction, as well as open standards-based Turbo coding to offer cost-effective communications.
The system demonstrates 100% backwards-compatibility with the existing LinkWay2100 series modem, and has been regularly ordered by the US Army and Marine Corps for a range of military programmes, including regional hub nodes (RHN), deployable Ku band earth terminals (DKET), and support wide area network (SWAN).
