"With this significant milestone, our SPACEWAY 3 satellite has officially commenced carrying revenue-bearing traffic, making Hughes a fully integrated service provider," said Pradman Kaul, president and CEO of Hughes. "We are excited to begin delivering HughesNet broadband services over the world's first commercial satellite with on-board switching to our rapidly growing base of consumer, SMB, enterprise, and government customers throughout North America."

Launched by Arianespace in August, 2007, SPACEWAY 3 was subsequently placed into geostationary orbit by Boeing in December, 2007, at which time Hughes assumed operational control. Extensive pre-commercial testing has been completed since then and Hughes has now achieved its goal of commencing commercial service in early 2008.

With 10 Gigabits per second of gross capacity, SPACEWAY 3 is the highest traffic-carrying satellite to be brought into service in North America. It was designed and developed as a next-generation, Ka-band broadband satellite system, and is the world's first commercial satellite to employ on-board traffic switching and routing. Combined with many other advances in satellite technology, such as dynamic beam forming, and direct small-dish-to- small-dish connectivity, SPACEWAY 3 ushers in a new world of bandwidth-on-demand HughesNet services accessed through a range of high-performance ground terminals.

Want to learn more about wireless technologies?

• What is a Wireless ISP?
• "How To" WISP Articles
• Build Request for Proposal
• Wireless ISP Budgets
• Wireless Internet Products
• Wireless Internet Vendors
• Wireless Internet Jobs
• Top 10 WISP List
• Top 10 Wi-Fi Hotspots
• Top 10 Wireless Vendors
• Types of Internet Access
• Types of Broadband Wireles 3G Technology
• Types of Broadband Wireless WiFi Technology
• Types of Broadband Wireless Mesh Network Technology
• Types of Broadband Wireless WiMAX Technology

Keywords: broadband satellite networks, broadband wireless, internet, spaceway 3, hughes network systems, hughesnet, dynamic beam, commercial satellite, arianespace, hughes communications, ground terminals, satellite technology, satellite system, gigabits, kaul, Satellite Broadband