Affordable satellite bandwidth could change rural access
There is little ADSL or 3G access in rural areas. Farms and lodges for example have no communications or are battling with dialup or EDGE services, which are next to useless, and their businesses are suffering as a result. There is research suggesting that safari lodges could increase their occupancies by 50% if they could offer their foreign guests quality internet 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.
About Douglas Reed
Douglas Reed is joint CEO at Vox Telecom. He is innovative and entrepreneurial, and he strongly believes in - and is suited to - creating wealth rather than competing for it. Contact him on tel: +27 (0)87 809 1541 or
az.oc.moceletxov@rsalguod.
