Richard McKinney is director of space acquisition in the Office of the Undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force. Rick Kozak / Staff

A revolution in military satellite communications capabilities will begin with the launch of the first Wideband Gapfiller Satellite next year, Richard McKinney, director of space acquisition in the Office of the Undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force, said Wednesday.

Speaking at the 6th annual C4ISR Journal Integration Conference, “New Tools for War in Real Time,” in Arlington, Va., McKinney previewed a near-term future that will see exponential growth in bandwidth, data-transfer rates and number of connections.

“The transformation is here,” he said. “The capability and capacity of the satellite systems that are going to see over the next five years is really going to be eye-watering. ... I think [war fighters] are going to be challenged to come up with new ways to use these systems.”

McKinney gave an overview of current military satellite communications capabilities and how three new satellite systems and advanced ground terminals will break new ground.

The first Wideband Gapfiller Satellite, scheduled to be launched next fall, will provide more bandwidth than the entire Defense Satellite Communications System constellation currently in operation, he said.

In 2008, with the launch of the first Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite, military operators will benefit from a five-fold increase in bandwidth, a 25-fold increase in data-transfer rate and a two- to three-fold increase in the number of simultaneous connections. AEHF will also increase the number of user terminals to about 2,000 and will boost the number of different networks that can be created from 1,500 today to more than 4,000.

The system also will be the first to involve international partners, McKinney said.

Around 2015, the Transformational Satellite Communications System (TSAT) will usher in “another era in communication,” he said. The system will increase data transfer from about 4 megabits per second today to about 40 gigabits per second in later iterations of TSAT.

TSAT will also be Internet Protocol-based and network-centric, McKinney said, allowing more operators to use the system at the same time.

As important as the satellites, McKinney said, are the terminals with which operators upload or download data. Terminals during the next decade will become smaller while increasing data throughput, he said.

Currently, he said, an air terminal operation would include 20 operators with four terminals aboard two C-130 cargo aircraft. In the future, that same capability will be achieved with four operators and one terminal occupying only half of a C-130.

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