Affordable satellite bandwidth could change rural access

Satellite has never been an option for these businesses because of the high costs involved. However, the new Ka-band satellites have changed the whole landscape. It's the first technology we've seen that offers a service that's both affordable and reliable enough.

Fills the need for remote-areas

The service is not intended to compete with uncapped ADSL. It fills the need for remote-areas access and is a great backup in urban areas, but the capacity is not unlimited. It has room for about 70 000 connections and it is a shared solution which means fair access policies will limit the solution."

The satellite is sitting in a geostationary orbit at about 36 000km, which means it takes about half of a second for a signal to make the trip from one ground-based transmitter to the satellite and back down to the ground station in Luxembourg. The high latency will not be a problem for email and web surfing, but the slight delay will be noticeable with voice calls and some VPN applications.

Demand for the services has already been a lot higher than expected. We had not realized the extent of the demand for a solution that was independent of the Telkom and GSM networks.

The satellite service expects to launch to the public in early August 2012.