The French Navy’s aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle relied on satellite connectivity from SES to maintain secure communications across a vast operating area during its most recent Clemenceau 25 deployment. From the Mediterranean to the Pacific, the five-month mission covered 40,000 nautical miles and involved joint exercises with almost 20 allied nations.
Through its Managed Naval mPOWERED service, SES provided connectivity through its O3b mPOWER system. To support both routine onboard needs and mission-critical operations like navigation, intelligence sharing, and surveillance, the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) network offered high-throughput, low-latency communications. The service delivered several hundred megabits per second of guaranteed throughput, ensuring coverage along the entire strike group’s route with gateways located in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. This dynamic allocation of capacity allowed the network to seamlessly manage the most demanding mission applications.
SES’s Senior Vice President of Global Government, Philippe Glaesener, said: “Aircraft carriers such as the Charles de Gaulle are essentially floating military bases. They require secure, resilient low-latency satellite connectivity service at all times to support the diverse and complex data needs of the personnel onboard.”
Currently operating 13 satellites at 8,000 kilometers above Earth, the O3b mPOWER system is designed to deliver reliable low latency and high availability with terabit-scale capacity that can be tailored for both commercial and government users. For the French Navy, this technology served as a communications backbone throughout one of its most extensive international missions.
To learn more about SES’s efforts, read the full article here.
