Today's leading commercial HCS broad-
band service providers – driven by band-
width economics and consumers' expo-
nentially increasing appetite for capacity.
When I spoke to the U.S.-based Vi-
asat, they emphasized the performance of
commercial high-capacity satellites, which
deliver improvements in end-user perfor-
mance (speed and equipment), increased
availability, superior anti-jam and cyber
protection over DoD purpose-built com-
munication satellites, and "order-of-mag-
nitude" improvements in cost of delivered
capacity.
"The Surveillance community is con-
tinually developing new sensor modali-
ties, higher resolution imaging systems,
and the means to fuse these multiple mo-
dalities for improved intelligence," said
Joseph Johnson, Director of Business
Development Government Systems at
Viasat. "We are investing in technologies
for secure, reliable and resilient commu-
nications across the battlespace that allow
this actionable intelligence to be dissemi-
technology WatCh
www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2018 37
nated to the point of need. Investments
in high throughput satellites, active cyber
Defence and small form factor Link-16
systems, just to name a few." A big part
of the emphasis for Viasat is cybersecurity,
including resiliency to RF jamming and
building unique infrastructure that makes
it impossible to exploit downlinks and its
bandwidth economics.
Again, back to the conversation of dis-
seminating and making sense of the data
collected – the Viasat-3 architecture of
many small spot beams, hundreds of small
ground stations and cloud-based core
nodes, allows for surveillance data to be
distributed to the necessary point securely
and in the face of emerging threats.
Innovation and collaboration of
Canadian tech companies
Many industry partners are engaging the
Canadian government to come up with a
space strategy to foster innovation and col-
laboration for various technologies, with
surveillance being a major focus. An em-
phasis in this strategy is to engage small
Canadian tech companies and to drive
innovation at all levels, fostering partner-
