How L3 Technologies and Global Xpress ensure high-data capabilities for government customers

L3 Technologies takes pride in being Inmarsat Government’s value-added reseller (VAR) and value-added manufacturing (VAM) partner, delivering ground-breaking Global Xpress services and terminals to U.S. government users worldwide for seamless, assured connectivity.

We are a leading provider of a broad range of communications, electronic and sensor systems used on military, homeland security and commercial platforms. Our secure communications are on virtually every mission-critical aircraft platform, from the pioneering U-2 and P-3 to the unmanned Predator and Global Hawk. L3’s world-class expertise in connecting space, airborne, ground and sea-based platforms with secure, real-time data drives its communications business in addressing the heightened global demand for advanced solutions.

We are a key integrator on state-of-the-art maritime platforms such as the U.S. Coast Guard’s Fast Response Cutter, with expertise extending to complex encryption and data security for a variety of new aircraft programs and U.S. Army infrastructure initiatives. In this evolving threat environment, L3’s ability to anticipate changing customer needs and provide timely, next-generation communications solutions such as Global Xpress has made situational awareness a strategic discriminator for customers across the globe.

Our partnership with Inmarsat has proven to be invaluable. Nowadays, with Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions requiring full-motion video and advanced high-throughput satellites, Global Xpress has emerged as a preferred choice of customers – and a preferred choice of ours as well. One of our largest customers, a government airborne agency, is our largest user of Global Xpress stationary beams. Its users require high data rates. That data instantly goes out to troops on the front line, making them completely aware of their surroundings, enabling mission success.

We have a customer, for example, who is now using a service that is not capable enough and cost effective for them. The customer is very interested in a Global Xpress solution using a lightweight flat panel and small integrated terminal that weighs less than 25 pounds. It literally will fit into a briefcase so users can discreetly “blend in” into whatever environment they operate. This L-3/AvL product will soon be type approved for Global Xpress, enabling customers to have a truly global, mobile experience.

With a long list of similar success stories, we strongly feel that Global Xpress aligns perfectly with the requirements of today’s government purchaser – a much different satellite services buyer than we served yesterday. In the past, we had lots of government funding flowing, and agencies paid for large chunks of bandwidth whether they used it or not. Now, it is all about bandwidth on demand – if you do not use it, you do not want to pay for it. So we have to package SATCOM so that it scales to agencies’ needs. Inmarsat Global Xpress SATCOM as a Service enables us to do this.

We are dedicated to doing ‘what it takes’ to make it easy for our customer to take advantage of the Global Xpress capability. We are a ‘one-stop shop’ company – our customers have just one belly button to push to get everything they need. We deliver the terminals, end-to-end service and anything in between. This way, users avoid buying terminals from one vendor and other components and services from another – and then have to go through multiple contacts to fix problems.

We consider ourselves unrivaled in service. We monitor our customers’ systems 24/7/365. Then, we invest heavily to establish field service representatives throughout all of our regions to help our customers. And if our field service representatives cannot solve their problem, then we put an engineer on a plane the next day to solve it.

Ultimately, if I had to describe our partnership with Inmarsat in one word, it would be ‘responsiveness’ – we really listen to our customers – to find out about their needs, wants and requirements. Then, we take action and deliver tailored solutions to their needs and excellent customer support.

Global Xpress is the first and only end-to-end commercial Ka-band network from a single operator – bringing universal high-throughput using a very small aperture terminal (VSAT) with Inmarsat’s renowned ease-of-use and always-on reliable capability.