A Q&A With Jeff LaMastus

Q: How is USEI using its engineering expertise and culture of innovation to evolve beyond traditional teleport operations and take advantage of new opportunities in the satellite market?

Jeff LaMastus: That’s a good question, Randall. And I think we touched on this a little bit in our last interview. Talked at that point about what our founder is doing in terms of innovation, but I think today we’ll spend a couple minutes talking about what the engineering team has been doing earlier this year.

It’s kind of an interesting story. You’re aware of the joint antenna marketplace, the JAM program is essentially what the U.S. government’s trying to do to leverage commercial teleport assets, so they don’t have to spend money recreating new infrastructure. Right? It’s a complex program, difficult to execute on.

One of the primary sponsors of this program engaged with us earlier this year, and one of our partners to perform a proof concept. And essentially, what they wanted to do on a very narrow scope is use a commercial teleport facility like Brewster, and use that to facilitate a link between a military satellite and a classified government NOC or operations center, and the key was to be able to do all that without having to install any government furnished equipment or crypto or anything like that, but still provide a very secure service that facilitates the communication.

We said, okay, good. We got together with our partner. We defined a system architecture that included your standard Earth station architecture, antennas, RF, and that kind of stuff. We combined that with the cloud environment. We had some software-defined capabilities, modems, radios, some transport, and network gear. But essentially, we put together a solution that answered the mail for the U.S. government, and they gave us a three-month period of performance to get this all done.

But in five weeks, we had already knocked it out of the park. We had essentially checked every box that the government gave us. We were able to download telemetry from a military satellite, send it back to a NOC, take commanding from that same NOC and run it back up to the satellite within the five-week period, and we spent the rest of the three months doing stretch goals for the U.S. government. It was really so successful that they then told us, you know, we want to take this operational. They issued an RFP, and we responded to it, and it’s going to give us the opportunity to use one of our international facilities and run four antennas for them in the exact same manner.

It’s an example of again engineering and innovation from our engineering team to you know create opportunity in the marketplace. And we’re pretty excited about it.

Q: What do you think differentiates USEI in an increasingly competitive ground infrastructure market?

Jeff LaMastus: I think some of the standard answers are our people, of course, and our customer service. But I think what we haven’t talked about in the past is USEI’s size. We’re a small business, and one of the biggest advantages of that for us is that we can move quickly, we can decide quickly, we can execute quickly.

We have a very small management team: Ben Pigsley, our CEO; Darrell White, our COO; and myself. And day to day, the three of us make most of the calls that are required, and we do that all via email or quick phone call. But it contrasts with where Ben and I both came from, much larger corporate organizations, and we could see decision-making processes take months, up to a year in some cases, and it could be very frustrating.

For us, it doesn’t matter what what the decision is. We can get Jim, the founder, on board, our board, if we need to. But within a matter of days, we can make decisions and satisfy our customers, or react to what’s happening in the marketplace, and we think that does give us an advantage.

Looking ahead, where do you see USEI five years from now?

Jeff LaMastus: That’s probably the toughest question, right? Because our industry is moving so quickly right now and changing so rapidly, it’s really hard to understand where are we going to be as an industry in five years.

I’m not going to be able to give you a real direct answer on this one. I’m going to say that regardless of what’s happening in the industry, USEI will continue to be supporting our customers, providing best-in-class service as we always do, and we’re going to be growing the business and diversifying into new business areas.