Disruption of Intelsat Service for U.S. Navy Was Short Lived

摘要

A failure warning on a communications node shut down commercial satellite links to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf region in August and demonstrated the advantage of the Navy's new way of procuring commercial satellite bandwidth, a Navy program manager said Oct. 12. Melinda Rate, assistant program manager for die Navy's Commercial Broadband Satellite Program (CBSP), said the CBSP contracting vehicle spared the Navy the need to slap together an emergency procurement of satellite capacity to make up for the communications breakdown. Instead, die Navy asked die CBSP prime contractor, Intelsat General Corp. of Washington, to solve the problem on its own. Ratz said Intelsat was able to resolve the issue by bypassing the defective communications link and re-establishing Fifth Fleet communications on another satellite.