Note 33

In 1992, a team led by Marcos Bergamo was selected by ARPA and NASA to design, develop, deploy and operate the world's first Gigabit Satellite Network (using NASA's Ka-band Advanced Communications Technology Satellite—ACTS).  The goal was to demonstrate the practical feasibility of integrating satellite and terrestrial Internet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching services to support distributed supercomputing, remote visualization and telemedicine applications. The initial architecture, performance requirements, challenges, and development recommendations for the network were first defined in a study BBN prepared for ARPA during the early 1990’s. A network of five transportable Ka-band (20/30 GHz) earth stations, built around the gigahertz-wide multiple-beam-hopping and on-board transponder-switching capabilities of ACTS, was completed in a tight two-year schedule.

The network was deployed to five US sites in 1994-95, and operated until April 2000 when the ACTS satellite was decommissioned.  During its lifetime the ACTS Gigabit Satellite Network was used for experiments including: a distributed supercomputing Lake Erie weather simulation, remote operation and visualization of the Keck telescope in Hawaii by astronomers at NASA Goddard, and multiple integrated ground-satellite Internet/ATM testbeds.  In 1997 key BBN developers of the Gigabit Satellite Network were inducted as “satellite innovators” to the US Space Technology Hall of Fame, and for his work Bergamo was personally recognized with the 2005 IEEE Judith Resnik Award.