What, exactly, is a tachyon? Other than being the nickname of the mysterious alien at the center of an outbreak of super-powered individuals in 1940’s New York in the Wild Cards series of sci-fi novels, the tachyon is actually a theoretical faster-than-light particle. It’s also the name of a company that boasts a unique software platform capable of connecting disparate satellite hardware.

Founded in 1997, the San Diego-based company started out as a 100 percent TCP/IP provider focusing on high-end enterprise applications and remote backup. Recently, however, the company has migrated most of its business to airborne communications, focusing on government contractors and some commercial customers.

Tachyon fills a unique niche in the satellite communications industry. Its proprietary platform, known as Axiom Services Platform (ASP), is a software-based platform that allows companies to connect antennas and units across vendors. This allows Tachyon to help their customers design customized arrangements of hardware to meet their technical and cost specifications. This flexibility is made possible because of ASP.

According to Elizabeth Rose (News - Alert) from Tachyon, the company’s platform is modem agnostic and can work on any band. Customers can tell Tachyon their requirements for size, weight, power and throughput and the company can put together a package to meet those needs.

Recently, Rose stated, an aircraft manufacturing customer approached Tachyon asking for a ground-based system that they would eventually migrate to their aircraft. Rose stated that this is a fairly typical customer interaction.

Rose also stated that the company has an extremely transparent managed network so if a customer needs to know why, say, communications went out for a few minutes in-flight, Tachyon can provide them with the pitch and yawl of the aircraft at the time of the outage.

Tachyon can’t do all of this at faster-than-light speed, of course, but the name and the niche the company occupies are both unique.