Gulfsat buys Hughes Broadband Satellite System

Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES), the world's leading provider of broadband satellite network solutions and services, and Gulfsat Communications Company (Gulfsat), a leading satellite service and solutions provider in the Middle East and North Africa, today announced that Gulfsat has purchased an HN System Network Operations Center (NOC).

The NOC was installed at the Globecomm Systems, Inc. (GSI) teleport in Hauppauge, New York where it will be used to provide a new broadband residential Internet access service, "Shownet Two-Way Service," that Gulfsat is launching in the Gulf region in the 4th quarter of 2007.

Mustafa Murad, chief operating officer at Gulfsat, said, "We are very pleased to be using the Hughes broadband satellite platform to provide our new, two-way residential Internet service and to have the first DVB-S2 NOC serving the residential market in the Gulf region."

Mr. Murad added, "One of the key factors in selecting Hughes was their proven experience with over 170,000 DVB-S2/ACM capable terminals shipped worldwide as of February 2007. The Hughes implementation of DVB-S2 allows us to provide a very efficient and cost-effective service to our customers with improved satellite Internet browsing and download performance at a level that traditional landline service cannot match."

The HN platform employs the most efficient implementation of the DVB-S2 industry standard including Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM), and is fully compliant with IPoS (IP over Satellite), the first global satellite industry standard approved by TIA in North America, and ETSI and ITU in Europe.

"We are proud to have been selected by Gulfsat to deliver our HN system solution. They are a valued customer of Hughes and have been providing excellent broadband satellite services to their customers in the Middle East and North Africa. It is very exciting to see them expand their suite of services to address new markets such as residential broadband," said Soheil Mehrabanzad, assistant vice president and regional manager, MEA, for Hughes.

By utilizing the Eutelsat Atlantic Bird 2, one of the most powerful satellites covering the Arabian Gulf, together with the advanced Hughes NOC operating at GSI's carrier-class facility in New York, Gulfsat's Shownet Two- Way Service will represent the latest generation of high-speed Internet access for customers in the Middle East.

For the first time in the region, Shownet Two-Way will be introducing consumption-based packages with speeds up to 2Mbps, enabled by integrated acceleration and spoofing techniques on the Hughes platform along with a new billing system.