The Navy is continuing a yearlong push to embed fifth-generation wireless technologies across its systems and installations, with the service’s 5G Integrated Product Team “making progress” on expanding network coverage.
Meanwhile, the Navy also continues to eye opportunities to advance ship-to-ship communications capability.
Jason Fox, director of the 5G IPT within the Department of the Navy Office of the Chief Information Officer, said the sea service has focused on leveraging commercial, academic and government investment in 5G.
“What we’re doing within the IPT to grab a hold of that is we are building and prototyping with 5G technologies, and we’re working with commercial industry to acquire the products that they’re building and the services that they’re offering,” Fox said on Federal News Network.
Fox’s team is focused on adding 5G connectivity to all Navy platforms, ranging from small unmanned aerial systems to aircraft carriers.
“We are fostering that mindset of getting 5G everywhere, and the folks that are responsible for writing the requirements for ships and building the ships are hearing those messages and hearing that advice, and are building it into their processes,” Fox said.
The Navy has been adding 5G and commercial satellite links to the fleet for several years. Fox said the Navy has been “very successful” in testing ship-to-shore connectivity using 5G technologies and protocols, which can transmit data faster at lower latency.
The Navy would like to have similar high-speed, low latency connections between vessels out at sea. Fox said the service sees promise in a technology called “sidelink,” a direct, device-to-device communication technology that doesn’t require network infrastructure. Sidelink is included in the original 5G standards.
While the technology has been touted as having uses in public safety and autonomous vehicle communications, commercial industry has yet to deploy sidelink in any meaningful way.
That has the Navy looking at alternatives for ship-to-ship communications upgrades. Fox said NATO has been experimenting with technologies in that arena, while commercially, integrated access and backhaul technology can enable “mesh” networks.
“Frankly, we’re still kind of working through that, what the alternatives are with using 5G for ship-to-ship,” Fox said.
Installation coverage
Another key focus for the 5G IPT is providing network coverage across the Navy’s installations. The Fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act includes a provision requiring the military services to develop plans for deploying private 5G and future generation Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) architecture on Defense Department installations.
“We’re making progress on that right now,” Fox said. “Every base inside the continental US, Navy or Marine Corps has some amount of 5G coverage, but many of them need more. So we’re focused on getting those networks expanded.”
Many Navy and Marine Corps installations are in rural and remote areas, where commercial 5G network coverage is sparse or nonexistent. That requires Fox’s team to look at other options, including private and hybrid networks.
He said the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., is a “great example” of where the Navy is expanding 5G coverage to support large-scale exercises.
“They’re having great success on both sides of the exercise, the folks that are running the exercise, managing it, and the folks that are participating in the exercise, using it for communications capabilities as they operate, just as it would be available to them in in in real world operations,” Fox said.
Spectrum challenges
Meanwhile, spectrum continues to be a major issues for DoD and the rest of the federal government.
“Spectrum is a critical national resource,” Fox said. “It’s a resource that enables so much of our industry and our capabilities and just what we do across the country, very hard decisions for our country to make on how we allocate and we leverage the spectrum that we have.”
The Navy’s strategic spectrum policy group focuses on how the service can “design and build and deploy and operate our systems in a way that allows us to access multiple pieces of spectrum to help us mitigate some of the challenges that we may have,” Fox said.
“The spectrum that we use when a ship is parked in a harbor in the U.S., say here in San Diego, may be different spectrum than what we would use out in the middle of the ocean, out in the middle of the Atlantic, and it may be different spectrum than what we would use when the ship pulls into a pier in a host nation or a partner nation,” he added.
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