India’s ONGC Selects Hughes JUPITER System for major Satellite Network upgrade

Hughes Communications India, Limited (‘Hughes India’), a majority-owned subsidiary of Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES), the broadband satellite solutions and services, announced that Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), India’s largest producer of crude oil and natural gas, has selected the Hughes JUPITER System to revamp and upgrade its existing satellite network across India.

Hughes India will implement the JUPITER System to augment its existing C‐Band Network with the latest HTS (High-throughput satellite) technology, delivering reliable multi‐service data, voice, and video traffic with high spectral efficiency across nearly 200 offshore and onshore oil and gas platforms, drilling rigs and vessels, including enterprise managed services in locations spread across the country.

The new setup will upgrade ONGC’s existing ICNET and MFTDMA networks to a state-of-the-art architecture employing four JUPITER gateways, SCPC carrier-grade modems and several large antenna and RF systems. Valued at over INR 45 crore (US$ 6.7 mn) the project will be carried out on a turnkey basis and will include new network installations, upgrades and network transition across 94 fixed sites and 112 nomadic sites with comprehensive maintenance for two years.

Partho Banerjee, Director, Hughes India said, “We are very proud to have been awarded this important project by ONGC, amid a tough competitive tender scenario. It validates the compelling benefits of high-performance, enterprise-class broadband delivered by our JUPITER System and is an endorsement of the wide range of system integration experience Hughes India has in implementing large turnkey networks.”

Shivaji Chatterjee, Head - Enterprise Services, Hughes India further added, “Satellite broadband is the ideal technology for extending connectivity to remote off-shore areas typically well beyond the reach of terrestrial and wireless options. With our proven high-throughput JUPITER System and associated state-of-the-art technologies, we are confident that ONGC will reap the many benefits of a next-generation network that is second-to-none in the country.”

The Hughes JUPITER System features a flexible and robust gateway architecture with lights-out operation, enhanced IPoS air interface for bandwidth efficiency, and high-throughput terminals, enabling operators to achieve the highest possible capacity and efficiency for any satellite broadband implementation. The underlying technology is the powerful JUPITER System on a Chip (SoC), a custom–designed microprocessor employing a multi-core architecture and enabling 100 Mbps of throughput on every terminal in the JUPITER family.