Res Communis

Defense Could Save with In-house Satellites

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

From Nextgov.com:

Official says Defense can save millions with in-house satellites

By Bob Brewin 02/20/2009

The Defense Department could save a total of $600 million from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2016 by shifting much of the traffic currently handled by commercial communications satellite operators to Wideband Global System satellites, a top Pentagon official told Nextgov.

Commercial satellite operators disagreed, and said they can provide capacity cheaper and more quickly than the WGS satellites, which are built by Boeing and owned and operated by the Defense Department.

Defense currently leases 6.2 GHz of commercial satellite capacity, wrote Danny Price, deputy director of communications, network programs and policies in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration, in an email. An internal study by the Defense Information Systems Agency obtained by Nextgov said that the lease costs $317 million annually. . . .[Full Story]