Officials at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state recently held a ribbon-cutting ceremony launching a 5G network that will significantly improve aircraft readiness, according to Hughes Network Systems, which was the system integrator. Working together on the project with Hughes are Boingo Wireless, Cisco, Dell, DISH, JMA Wireless and Intel.
Aircraft preparedness will be facilitated through the processing of significant amounts of digital data at higher speeds. 5G will improve immediate real-time communication coordination across the flight line to reduce maintenance time and decrease preparation time between missions.
The launch comes one year after Hughes Network Systems won an $18 million contract from the Department of Defense to deploy a standalone 5G network at the Naval Air Station.
The Hughes 5G network uses spectrum from DISH Wireless, a carrier capable of providing the right combination of low band, mid band, and high band spectrum. This work is part of on-going DoD 5G experimentation led by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, according to Hughes.
“Over the course of this three-year project, we will demonstrate for the U.S. Department of Defense how 5G infrastructure from Hughes – including a packet processing core, radio access, edge cloud, security and network management – can power the resilient networking necessary to transform base operations,” said Dr. Rajeev Gopal, vice president, Advanced Programs, Hughes.
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