We'd assumed it had already happened before, since both companies are controlled by Chairman Charlie Ergen, but Dish Network pay TV and Hughes Networks Systems satellite broadband are bundling their services for hard-to-reach rural customers for the first time. 

New customers who bundle Dish pay TV with the Hughesnet Internet will receive $5 off each service. The bundle also includes a two-year price-lock guarantee. 

Dish and Hughes are now under the same corporate roof, following the merger of Dish into EchoStar back in January.

"With the combination of Hughes and Dish technologies, innovation, and leadership focused on rural American homes, we are more strategically aligned, and the customer remains at the center of what we do," said Paul Gaske, chief operating officer, Hughes, in a statement. "Rural customers have traditionally had limited options for TV and internet in rural America. Dish and Hughes are solving those hurdles by further advancing connectivity in rural communities to provide the best value in TV and Internet."

Hughesnet ISP tiers start at $60 a month for a package that delivers 50 megabits per second downstream. The company's technology backbone is now backed by the new Jupiter 3 satellite, which was launched last July, and is capable of delivering speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

For now, the Dish and Hughes services are segregated as two distinct services delivered by different satellites to separate receiver dishes on customer rooftops. But the two companies are working on various other forms of integration that go beyond billing. 

There's reportedly talk of bundling virtual pay TV service Sling TV with Hughesnet. Dish's Android TV-based Hopper Plus digital video recorder system is also being optimized to work with Hughesnet tech. 

As it looks to complete its pricey national buildout of a 5G wireless network, it would certainly help EchoStar to improve the cash flow of its legacy business.

Dish satellite TV lost 213,000 customers in the first quarter, but that did represent a significant improvement over the 318,000 lost from January - March of last year. 

And Hughes lost 26,000 broadband customers in Q1 vs. a year-ago quarterly loss of 51,000. 

Hughes Network Systems, a unit of EchoStar, said it has enhanced the capability of its Jupiter broadband satellite platform and made progress with its work with OneWeb, an initiative that is developing a constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites for broadband.

On the Jupiter front, Hughes said it has doubled the throughput of HT2xxx terminals, to more than 200 Mbps, which, for example, will bring more data capacity to the Jupiter Aero System, which delivers more than 600 Mbps to each aircraft that’s served.

RELATED: Broadband’s Space Race Heats Up

The Jupiter System, which has also added an in-route prioritization scheme for faster browsing for encrypted web pages and apps like automatic tellers, is currently deployed on more than 20 satellites round the world.

Hughes, which times the announcement with the Satellite 2018 show, is also working on Jupiter 3 (EchoStar XXIV), a high-capacity satellite that will be capable of delivery 100 Mbps or more. That satellite is expected to enter service sometime in 2021.

For the OneWeb project, Hughes’s gateways include multiple tracking antennas to support operation and handoff of traffic to and from the coming LEO satellites. Hughes said each gateway will be able to handle up to 10,000 terminal hand-offs per second.

Hughes said the shipment is the first of 40 gateways that will support OneWeb, factoring into a $190 million contract announced in November 2017.

February was a busy month in the world of satellite broadband as a new speedy service was launched, a pair of demo satellites were slung into low earth orbit, and another high-capacity bird took a step toward the launch pad.

-The most significant of these was this week’s launch of a new 100 Mbps (downstream) service from Viasat that enters play roughly nine months after the satellite that is beaming that capacity, ViaSat-2, was launched from Kourou, French Guiana, aboard Arianspace’s Ariane 5 heavy-lift launch vehicle and placed into geosynchronous orbit.

While the new offering will provide unlimited data (customers could see slower speeds in period of congestion after they exceed a monthly soft data ceiling), it’s not cheap either – offered at a promotional price of $150 per month that rises to $200 per month after three months.

-EchoStar’s Hughes Network Systems division said it has reached the preliminary design phase on Jupiter 3 (EchoStar XXIV), another high-capacity satellite that will be capable of delivery 100 Mbps or more. Service on Jupiter 3 isn’t expected to start until 2021.

-A week ago (February 22), Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched two “demonstration” Starlink satellites that are part of an effort to eventually offer broadband using a constellation of thousands of LEO satellites.

Musk also tweeted an update as those two satellites – called Tintin A and Tintin B -- were deployed, later joking that the WiFi passwords for them is “martians”:

First two Starlink demo satellites, called Tintin A & B, deployed and communicating to Earth stations pic.twitter.com/TfI53wHEtz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2018

In addition to providing extensive broadband coverage, the LEO approach aims to also cut down one of the issues that’s typical of satellite broadband: latency.

Despite SpaceX’s high-flying ambitions,The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the complexities of the project could play a role in extending the timetable, and that SpaceX still doesn’t have a good fix on what the ultimate costs will be.

Though SpaceX hasn’t announced a new schedule, the current, tentative goal is to start “limited service by 2020 now appears unrealistic,” the paper added, also citing documents from 2015 suggesting that Musk & Co. had projected that the satellite broadband biz is in position to have more than 40 million subs and pull down more than $30 billion in revenues by 2025.

-OneWeb, another LEO-focused satellite broadband initiative backed by investors such as Intelsat, Virgin Qualcomm, SoftBank and Hughes, hasn’t broken any news lately, though Hughes did note that it’s providing gateway equipment for OneWeb’s ground network under a contract currently worth $300 million, and that it might pursue rights to offer service on OneWeb’s network. OneWeb, which has plans to launch hundreds of light, mass-production satellites, plans to support more than 7 Tbps of total capacity in the first phase of the system.

Given the launch of a new 100-meg consumer broadband service, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg was making the rounds in the media. And, as you might expect, he was asked to weigh in on the competitive threat posed by projects like SpaceX’s.

Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, he said SpaceX will present competition “eventually…if they can build a few hundred or a thousand more of them and get them into space.”

Though LEO constellations promise to deliver lower latencies, he also held that Viasat’s use of satellites in geosynchronous orbit bring other benefits.

Larger, geosynchronous satellites like Viasat’s, he said, are placed into fairly safe orbits that don’t change with respect to the Earth or to other GEO satellites. By comparison, LEO systems will be more complex – there will be many more of them, and they will be constantly moving irrespective to each other and to the Earth.

Dankberg agreed there’s some sorting out needed with respect to security and privacy issues when asked what would happen if international law fell behind the pace of technology.

“That is a big issue, and there’s really no global agency that’s dealing with that,” he said.

He also shed some light on the economics of Viasat’s business. Though people make a big deal about launch prices, it’s not the most expensive part of the equation, compared to the satellite itself and the extensive ground fiber network that underpins the system.

[Images: Top (left to right): Renderings of the ViaSat-2 satellite and OneWeb low-earth orbit satellite. Bottom (left to right): The Arianspace Ariane 5 launch vehicle, and SpaceX's Falcon 9 two-stage rocket.]

EchoStar’s Hughes Networks Systems unit is making progress on a new broadband satellite that will be capable of delivering speeds of 100 Mbps-plus across a footprint covering the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil and other countries in South America.

Hughes has tapped Space Systems Loral to build the high-density satellite, called Jupiter 3 (or EchoStar XXIV). The project is in the “preliminary design phase,” with the design review milestone expected to be complete by the first half of 2018, Pradman Kaul, president of Hughes, said Thursday on EchoStar’s Q3 earnings call.

Service on Jupiter 3 is expected to launch in 2021, and complement the Jupiter 1 and 2 satellites, while also providing some capacity and coverage for the Eutelsat 65 West satellite and Telesat 19V.

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Kaul noted that beam coverage from Jupiter 3 will be optimized where it anticipates the most demand, rather than going with an approach that provided uniform blanket coverage. The satellite itself will serve all of Hughes’s traditional markets, such as consumer, enterprise, cellular backhaul and community WiFi.

Hughes and EchoStar are pushing ahead with Jupiter 3 amid increased competition from Viasat, which is nearing the launch of services on ViaSat-3, a broadband satellite that will deliver speeds of 100 Mbps or more and support unlimited data plans.

RELATED: ViaSat-2 Satellite Deemed ‘Ready for Service’

As Hughes works on Jupiter 3, it’s satellite broadband customer numbers continue to rise almost a year after the service debut of its Gen5 offering that can deliver speeds of up to 25 Mbps downstream, and 3 Mbps upstream.

EchoStar/Hughes added about 68,000 satellite broadband subs in Q4, up from 18,000 in the year-ago period, ending the year with about 1.2 million, a number that includes retail, wholesale and business customers.

Hughes is also involved in OneWeb, a platform that will use a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to deliver services into rural areas, and counts Intelsat, Virgin Qualcomm, SoftBank and Hughes among its investors.

RELATED: FCC OKs OneWeb Satellite Broadband Service

In addition to its investment, Hughes is also providing gateway equipment for OneWeb’s ground network under a contract that, so far, totals more than $300 million.

Though Hughes’s relationship with OneWeb is currently hardware-centric, it’s also working on other arrangements that would give Hughes rights to offer services on OneWeb’s LEO network, Anders Johnson, chief strategy officer and president of EchoStar Satellite Services, said.

Hughes Network Systems, a unit of EchoStar, tallied 53,000 new satellite broadband subs in Q3 2017, extending that total to 1.14 million and improving on a year-ago decline of 12,000 subs.

As of September 30, Hughes had about 340,000 subscribers on its new Gen5 platform, which delivers up to 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. Gen5, which entered service in March, and delivers speeds that are aligned with the FCC’s current definition of “broadband.”

RELATED: Looking For Powerful Liftoff (subscription required)

“We continue to believe that the market for satellite broadband in the United States remains large, and [represents] over 18 million households, with about half of these being unserved and the other half underserved by existing wireline technologies,” Pradman Kaul, Hughes’ CEO and president, said on Wednesday’s earnings call.

He noted that the satellite broadband market here has fewer than 2 million subs, so Hughes still believes that there’s “significant opportunities for material growth” in that segment.

But some analysts aren’t impressed with Hughes's current rate of growth. One on today’s call asked why Hughes hasn’t been able to secure more customers and if more marketing or partnerships were needed to move the needle.

Pradman said Hughes is pleased with its progress, but is also hopeful that those sub numbers will rise more rapidly as it sees improvements in churn.

He said earlier in the call that new Gen5 service has helped to improve churn, and that it’s seeing strong demand in areas covered by DSL.

Michael Dugan, EchoStar’s president and CEO, added that the company is also being careful to ensure that it’s getting the “right consumers” on board.

"We’ve learned some hard lessons from other businesses,” Dugan said. “We could increase the number of gross ads and even net adds, but in the long term some of those subs won’t stick with us. We are very focused on the right sub base.”

Pradman continued to downplay the threat posed to Hughes from fixed wireless broadband services.

“The impact of wireless is limited because as we see growth of LTE and 5G, frequencies they are operating in and the markets they're operating in involved in are not markets we are going into…We continue to go after the unserved and underserved markets, where we don't see an expansion of the 5G and the LTE networks.”

Looking ahead, Hughes has contracted Space Systems Loral to build a next-gen satellite – EchoStar XXIV/Jupiter 3 -- that will enable the company to offer speeds of 100 Mbps or more in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, as well as other parts of South America. 

RELATED: ViaSat 2 Launches With Big Broadband Potential

Pradman noted that the new satellite, which isn't expected to launch until early 2021, will use beam coverage to reach areas where it anticipates the most demand, rather than using it for uniform blanket coverage.

“Our new satellite will be the engine that powers our future growth,” he said.

Hughes Network Systems, a unit of EchoStar, said this week it’s eyeing broadband speeds of 100 Mbps and more via new high-density satellite that’s expected to launch in early 2021.

Hughes, which ended Q2 with 1,085,000 satellite broadband subs, has tapped Space Systems Loral to build the next-gen Jupiter 3 bird, which will be designated “EchoStar XXIV.”

The new satellite will target “key markets” across the Americas, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil and other countries in South America, and will more than double the Hughes Ka-band capacity in the region, the company said.

Plans for the new satellite come more than two months after ViaSat launched ViaSat2, a high-powered satellite with 300 Gbps of total throughput that will also eye service tiers of 100 Mbps and more. ViaSat 2 is expected to enter into service in early 2018, with services slated to get underway in Q4 of the company’s fiscal 2018.

RELATED: ViaSat 2 Launches With Big Broadband Potential

Hughes launched its HughesNet Gen5 service in March and has been upgrading subs to the speedier platform, which matches a 25 Mbps downstream with a 3 Mbps upstream and is powered by EchoStar XIX/Jupiter 2, a multi-spot-beam, Ka-band satellite made by Space Systems Loral that launched in December 2016.

Though Hughes has largely focused on rural areas, it’s seeing opportunities where DSL service is weak, Peter Gulla, Hughes’s SVP of marketing, told Multichannel News in a recent interview.

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“Right now, 25 [Mbps] seems to be meeting the needs of our customers,” he said at the time. “But that doesn’t mean that’s the end of the line.”

The appeal of satellite broadband services have been limited somewhat by restrictive data caps and latency issues that impair interactive services such as VoIP and multiplayer gaming. In some instances, satellite broadband players are also expected to see more competition from speedier LTE and next-gen 5G-based fixed wireless data offerings.

Hughes president Pradman Kaul downplayed the severity of the 5G threat on EchoStar’s Q2 call.

“The problem is that the amount of bandwidth available at that spectrum is… in smaller pieces of bandwidth,” he said, according to Space Intel Report. They won’t be competing with us directly because we’re going up to 100 megabits per second. In the low end of the spectrum that 5G will be using, that’s not a competitor. Then you go into the millimeter-wave spectrum, the 28-, 30-, 37-GHz pieces. There, the cell sizes are very small, but they will be focused in the urban areas, where we don’t compete.”

ViaSat ended its fiscal Q1 with 625,000 residential broadband subscribers. The company attribute that loss, of about 34,000 subs, to a mix of seasonality, Hughes’s new Jupiter 2 satellite as well as unlimited mobile wireless services.

Kourou, French Guiana — “We have more internets!”

After years of tension and toil, that was the joyful exultation of a ViaSat engineer the night of June 2, nearly 45 minutes after ViaSat 2, a new high-capacity broadband satellite, was successfully launched into orbit aboard an Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket from Arianespace’s facilities in French Guiana.

The new bird, built by Boeing Commercial Satellite Systems, is equipped to deliver a powerful payload of 300 Gigabits per second of total throughput.

ViaSat 2 won’t enter service until early 2018 (ViaSat announced on June 22 that the solar arrays of the new satellite were successfully deployed), but the company is already laying the groundwork to deliver satellite broadband services of 100 Megabits per second or more.

For satellite-delivered broadband, that will represent a major accomplishment. A 100 Megabits-per-second offering would essentially quadruple the maximum downstream speeds now delivered by ViaSat’s current top end “Exede” service, as well as what’s offered by one of its chief rivals, Echo-Star-owned Hughes Network Systems.

“We’re still working on our plans, but we likely will have service plans that are up to 100 Mbps, and we may have some that are as high as 200 Mbps,” Mark Dankberg, chairman and CEO of ViaSat, said in an interview just hours before the launch, and during a driving rainstorm that, thanks to the lack of lightning, was never truly a threat to scrub the big event. “The satellite’s capable of that. The real issue is how do we price those plans and how many subscribers can we put on them?”

Though a 100 Mbps satellite-delivered broadband service is achievable, Dankberg said he believes most of the company’s subscribers will be on tiers that deliver slower speeds. But the launch of ViaSat 2 will give the company, which has about 659,000 satellite-broadband subscribers, the ability to far exceed what it’s delivering in the U.S. today using a legacy satellite fleet that includes ViaSat 1 and birds acquired in its 2009 acquisition of WildBlue Communications.

In addition to delivering gobs of bandwidth, ViaSat 2, at an orbital location of 22,236 miles above the earth’s equator (at 69.9 degrees west longitude), will enable ViaSat to expand coverage in North America, Central America, the Caribbean and a portion of northern South America. Key transportation routes between North America and Europe also are expected to benefit.

And there’s a lot more to come. “ViaSat has ambitions to be a global broadband services company,” Dankberg said. “This ViaSat 2 launch is a big step along the way for us towards that path.”

Faster and More Competitive
The ability to deliver faster speeds will give ViaSat a way to compete more directly with cable operators, telcos and other wireline internet service providers. But that won’t be the primary focus.

“Our mission is to be a really good choice for the underserved — not necessarily for people who already have access to fiber-to-the-home or the most modern cable [high-speed internet] service,” Dankberg said. “But the qualification I’m going to make to that is, we want to give that same experience to people who otherwise can’t get it.”

ViaSat 2 will help to turn ViaSat into a bigger regional provider of services that will also span government and enterprise customers while also enhancing its ability to deliver high-quality inflight connectivity as well as broadband service to cruise ships.

It will also amp up competition with Hughes Network Systems, which launched its HughesNet Gen5 service in March, and has already added about 100,000 new and upgrading subscribers to the speedier platform, which matches a 25 Mbps downstream with a 3 Mbps upstream. Gen5 is powered by EchoStar XIX/Jupiter 2, a multi-spot-beam, Ka-band satellite made by Space Systems Loral that launched on Dec. 18, 2016, and complements Hughes’s EchoStar XVII and Spaceway 3 data satellites.

Related: Hughes Tees Up Faster Satellite Broadband Service

Hughes, which has about 1.04 million satellite broadband subs and reaches both U.S. continental coasts plus parts of Alaska, believes it’s playing an important role because terrestrial broadband providers are more limited in how rapidly they can expand and generally don’t put a lot of focus on rural areas, according to Peter Gulla, senior vice president of marketing at Hughes.

Gulla said Hughes is also “finding a lot of opportunity” in areas where the telcos are letting their DSL networks languish as many instead focus on new fixed wireless options.

Still, Hughes will keep its target focused mostly on rural areas and where DSL service is weak, rather than applying marketing dollars and other resources in areas where wireline broadband competition is already strong.

“We are starting to see opportunities in the slow DSL areas,” Gulla said. “But you won’t be seeing us dropping a lot of flyers in New York City trying to convince people that they ought to switch to satellite [broadband]. I think we’re being realistic about what our product is and what it’s good for and what it does and what the value is.”

Though ViaSat is getting ready to raise the speed bar for satellite-delivered broadband, Hughes is not yet making any formal commitments to upgrade its capabilities.

“Right now, 25 [Mbps] seems to be meeting the needs of our customers,” Gulla said. “But that doesn’t mean that’s the end of the line.”

Need for Pricing, Data Flexibility
Beyond speed, other issues remain hot-button competitive factors. Among them: Satellite broadband-service providers will need to be more flexible on pricing and support relaxed data policies if they are to have much success in their traditional markets, even as some of them look to extend beyond rural regions, Jeff Heynen, consulting director and analyst at Kagan, said. Strict and complicated usage caps and data plans have long been sticking points for the satellite services.

Related: FCC OKs OneWeb Satellite Broadband Service

Under policies for ViaSat’s current Exede service, for instance, subscribers get a fixed amount each month of “Priority Data” at speeds of up to 12 Mbps to 25 Mbps, and, once those data buckets are used up, it pivots to slower speeds — between 1 Mbps to 5 Mbps. For its higher-end tiers, ViaSat also supports an unmetered “Free Zone” from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., when traffic tends to be the lightest. ViaSat also lets customers purchase more Priority Data for $10 per gigabyte, or discounts if they purchase buckets of 5 GB, 7 GB or 10 GB.

“In the past, most satellite services that are consumer priced have had hard limits to the amount of bandwidth that you can use,” Dankberg acknowledged. “We’ve been testing, on ViaSat 1, service plans that are virtually unlimited. With ViaSat 2, we’ll be able to make those more common, lower priced and with higher speeds.”

The HughesNet Gen5 service offers data plans ranging from 10 GB to 50 GB per month, before speeds are reduced to about 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps. It also comes with a “Video Data Saver” option that adjusts the bit rate to deliver video in DVD quality. Those customers still have the ability to watch in HD by toggling off the Video Data Saver capability. HughesNet’s data policy also includes “Bonus Zone” hours (from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m.), when the customer can use 50 GB per month of free data rather than pulling it from their monthly service plan. HughesNet suggests that Bonus Zone hours are used to download large files such as movies and system updates.

Achieving success in new markets, Heynen of Kagan stressed, will hinge greatly on competitive pricing and the easing of data caps as they face off with competition from wireline internet service providers, as well as emerging LTE- and 5G-powered fixed wireless options that will be capable of delivering hundreds of Megabits of data per second and possibly Gigabit-class speeds.

“As people use more data and OTT, they are going to be very wary of pushing the boundaries of those data caps,” Heynen said. “They have to find a way to make the data caps as well as the monthly pricing reasonable for the service.”

AT&T, for example, is pushing ahead with a big rollout of fixed LTE services. “Out in those rural areas, LTE is a potential competitive threat,” Heynen said, noting that he doesn’t expect satellite broadband to continue to have the most success in its traditional focus areas, serving areas instead without much landline broadband and servicing airplanes and cruise ships.

“I don’t see the cost structure allowing [satellite broadband ISPs] to compete with a traditional DSL, cable or fiber service,” he said. However, he said he does believe satellite broadband services that are equipped with 100 Mbps capability can offer a “reasonable alternative,” particularly as DSL service struggles to deliver speeds any greater than 25 Mbps.

Licking the Latency Issue
Though satellite broadband is poised to deliver speeds that can match up with some of its earthbound rivals, the issue that’s toughest to overcome is latency, which can impact some interactive apps and services such as VoIP and multiplayer gaming.

According to the Federal Communications Commission’s 2016 Measuring Broadband America Fixed Broadband Report, the median latencies of satellite-based broadband services range from 599 milliseconds to 629 milliseconds, versus terrestrial-based broadband services, which range from 12 milliseconds to 58 milliseconds.

“I can’t go against the laws of physics, but I’d like to,” Hughes’s Gulla said. “But the bottom line is that there’s that traveling distance to and from satellite, and at the current distances, you have latency.”

He said Hughes is upfront about that with customers. “We do our best to explain and ask [customers] what they intend to do when they call us. We’re very clear that if you’re doing first-person shooter games, you’re not going to win.”

Other satellite-broadband initiatives are looking to overcome that latency issue.

One prime example is SpaceX, the privately held aerospace firm run by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. USA Today, citing comments from Patricia Cooper, the company’s VP of satellite government affairs, reported that SpaceX is planning to launch 4,425 small satellites via reusable Falcon 9 rockets to support a constellation of lower-latency, low-earth-orbit birds, alongside a proposal for another 7,815 satellites that are even closer to the Earth’s surface.

Additionally, Airbus is planning a fleet of hundreds of small, low-earth-orbit (about 750 miles above the Earth’s surface) satellites in a joint venture with a startup called OneWeb. According to CNN, the joint venture is eyeing one launch every 21 days from French Guiana, with the first expected to lift off in about nine months. Service via the partnership, which includes backing from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Qualcomm and Japan’s SoftBank, is reportedly expected to start in 2019 and to cover the globe by 2020. The FCC approved OneWeb’s request to deliver service in the U.S. in late June.

ViaSat is also casting its eye toward global coverage with its planned set of ViaSat 3 satellites. The first, which will expand and enhance ViaSat’s coverage in the Americas, is planned to launch in 2019, followed in 2020 by a satellite that will cover the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. ViaSat hasn’t announced when it expects to launch its third ViaSat 3 satellite, but it’s slated to provide coverage in the Asia-Pacific region.

Hughes Network Systems said it is closing in on the launch of HughesNet Gen5, a national satellite Internet service outfitted with monthly data plans that will meet the FCC’s current defined speeds for “broadband” – 25 Mbps downstream by 3 Mbps upstream.

RELATED: FCC Ups Sec. 706 Broadband Speed to 25 MbpsHughes, a unit of EchoStar Corp., said it the new 25-meg offering will live on March 16 and come with data plans ranging from 10 gigabytes to 250 GB per month. Pricing on the HughesNet Gen5 residential service starts at $49.99 per month, with data plans that include up to 50 Gigabytes per month. Business plans for that tier start at $69.99 per month, with data plans up to 250 GB. The service includes in-home/location WiFi.

If customers exceed their monthly data limits, continues at a “reduced speed” until the next billing cycle. Per the policy for the current HughesNet Gen 4 service, speeds are reduced to 150 kilobits per second when the monthly data allowance is exceeded.

The Gen5 offering will also support a “Bonus Zone” that includes 50 GB of free data per month for use in the off-peak hours of 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. The service also includes an optional Video Data Saver that adjusts data rates for streaming video to DVD quality and enables more viewing of shows and movies while using less bandwidth. Customers also have the ability to temporarily opt out of the video quality feature for a period of four hours.  

The faster offering, to be available across the continental U.S. and part of Alaska, is powered by the recently launched EchoStar XIX satellite along with the EchoStar XVII satellite, and underpinned by the Hughes Jupiter satellite networking platform. From its 97.1° orbital slot, EchoStar XIX’s 138 beams provide coverage for high-speed Internet service to homes and small businesses in the continental United States, Alaska, Mexico and parts of Canada and Central America.

“HughesNet Gen5 will bring a new level of Internet services to the approximately 18 million households across the United States that are either unserved or suffering from slow wireline Internet services,” Pradman Kaul, president of Hughes Network Systems, said in a release.”

Hughes ended 2016 with 1.03 million broadband subs.