INDOPACOM covers a huge area of the globe, encompassing 36 countries and more than 50 percent of the world’s total population – including many of our nation’s allies, trading partners and adversaries. DoD has assigned more than 200 ships and 375,000 personnel to the region, making reliable, high-bandwidth communications both necessary and difficult.

“I think that the services need to develop a similar model so that they can deliver with a speed of need the data, the processing at the edge, in a low-latency type experience.”

-Fred Ferares, Director, Department of Defense, Verizon 

To delve into the challenges of military communications in such a diverse area, along with the solutions that commercial satellite networks can deliver, we talked with Chris Kinman, Vice President of Business Development at SES Government Solutions, and Fred Ferares, Director, Department of Defense at Verizon .

…these Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites are actually moving overhead—like a mobile cell phone tower— provid[ing] lower latency and more security and additional bandwidth because they’re so low to the Earth.

-Chris Kinman, Vice President of Business Development at SES Government Solutions

For the Government Technology Insider Podcast, these experts spelled out how improved connectivity can support both national security and humanitarian goals, enable edge computing in austere environments, and whether MEOsatellite networks can meet the DoD’s security needs.

Listen to the conversation here: