Hughes Director James Clevenger on Providing Satellite Systems Integration Support for Government Customers

James Clevenger, director of government sales at Hughes Network Systems, discussed how the company helps government agency customers and other clients integrate geosynchronous orbit satellite capabilities with low Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit satellite systems to meet their specific mission requirements.

“And so we really look at each individual customer, be it a federal customer or a state, you know, first responder, and look at what the applications and the needs are,” Clevenger said in a recent interview on IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

“And then we have a very unique set of technologies, help integrate them so that end customer cannot worry about that and can go on and fight the fire or the tornado or whatever the incident is that they have to respond to with, you know, almost no notice in some cases,” he added.

During the interview, the head of government sales noted that the merger of EchoStar and Dish Network has provided Hughes with a range of satellite capabilities and other technology offerings to meet the needs of first responders and other end users.

In January, Hughes’ parent company EchoStar closed its acquisition of Dish Network as part of efforts to strengthen its position as a global terrestrial and non-terrestrial connectivity provider to government and business customers. 

“DISH and EchoStar now have a unique set of assets, and what DISH brought to the table was their spectrum and their cellular capabilities. So Hughes is now in a very unique position where we have the traditional GEO satellite capabilities that I think we’re built on and everybody probably knows us as,” Clevenger told Donnie Jackson, editor of IWCE’s Urgent Communications. 

“But in addition to that, we are now connected to the one web cluster of LEO satellites and have an offering of Hughes managed LEO as well as our now we manufacture our flat panel antennas, our ESAs that connect to that Hughes managed LEO network that everyone is talking about, as well as some of our more traditional services,” the Hughes executive added.