The new Ka-band satellite service - the Y1B satellite - is not intended to compete with uncapped ADSL.
So says Vox Telecom MD Douglas Reed, who explains that the service offers affordable broadband satellite services to SA's rural communities where poor Internet access is still holding businesses back.
The Y1B satellite, which was successfully launched in Kazakhstan last month, will cover SA with six Ka-band spot beams.
“There is little ADSL or 3G access in rural areas,” says Reed. “Farms and lodges for example have absolutely no communications or are battling along using dial-up services, which are next to useless, and their businesses are suffering as a result.
“I've seen research suggesting that safari lodges could increase their occupancies by 50% if they could offer their foreign guests quality Internet access,” he adds.
“It fills the need for remote-areas access and is a great backup in urban areas, but the capacity is not unlimited. We have room for about 70 000 connections and it is a shared solution, which means fair access policies will limit the solution.”
He also explains that the satellite is sitting in a geostationary orbit at just under 36 000km up, which means it takes about half 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 e-mail and Web surfing, but the slight delay will be noticeable with voice calls and some VPN applications.”
Nevertheless, says Reed, demand for the services “has already been a lot higher than we expected. We hadn't realised the extent of the demand for a solution that was independent of the Telkom and GSM networks.”
Vox has already begun testing the satellite service and expects to launch to the public in early August.
Dawie de Wet, CEO at Q-Kon, also believes that, in the past, satellite was generally considered too expensive for the consumer, as cost constraints pushed the technology out of reach of most people.
“The irony is that satellite is essentially a broadcast network that has been adapted for data and Internet broadcasting. It is a ubiquitous service that can be controlled end-to-end and is suited for Internet communication,” says De Wet.
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