After four days of non availability of internet services in Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC and Sub Sahara Africa on account of West Africa Cable System, WACS, undersea cable cut, high-performance internet connectivity has been restored. This was made possible within just four days by the Satellite-based connectivity services provided jointly by the long-term partners- Gilat Telecom and SES.
While SES operates the world’s only multi-orbit constellation of satellites with the unique combination of global coverage and high performance, Gilat Telecom, on the other hand, offers satellite and fiber-based connectivity solutions, delivering high quality broadband communication to MNOs, telcos, ISPs, governments, enterprise customers, and organizations in Africa, Asia and South America.
A statement made available to OpenLife by Apo Group
stated that the recent cable cuts
affected much of Sub-Saharan Africa, causing internet outages and slow speeds.
The swift restoration to bring the service back to Gilat Telecom’s DRC
customers was achieved by leveraging unparalleled high-throughput, low-latency
O3b Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite capabilities.
“High-throughput, low-latency satellite solutions and applications enabled by
SES have proved their reliability and performance, drastically changing the
connectivity landscape in the DRC over the past years. It has now been the
fifth consecutive year that we are delivering highly reliable seamless services
thanks to MEO, reaching underserved and unserved locations where fibre cannot
be deployed or has been compromised. This has been revolutionary for the MNOs
we serve, who are now able to deploy services that require low latency,” said
Dan Zajicek, CEO of Gilat Telecom.
An O3b MEO system customer of SES since 2014, and the first in Africa, Gilat
Telecom recently expanded its partnership with SES to provide more bandwidth to
rural areas and extend services beyond Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, reaching
unserved or underserved Kisangani, Mbuji-Mayi and Bunia, to customers such
as Orange DRC. Under the new agreement, Gilat Telecom is using multiple Gbps of
bandwidth on the O3b system and is now also adding services via SES’s
Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites. The expanded capabilities enabled
by SES’s multi-orbit fleet will allow Gilat Telecom to deploy 4G/LTE networks
and support cloud computing services, even in the remotest areas of the DRC.
“With the extension of MEO and addition of the GEO-enabled capability, we can
now achieve even more, serving the exponentially growing demand in more
locations, by seamlessly integrating terrestrial and satellite technologies
that effectively complement each other,” Zajicek said.
“Supporting Gilat Telecom’s efforts in extending high-performance connectivity
throughout the DRC has been a great privilege for us, and we are proud to have
been enabling this transformational endeavour with O3b’s fibre-like
connectivity solutions over the past years,” said Carole Kamaitha, Vice
President, Sales Africa at SES Networks. “We cannot be more excited to see our
longstanding partner and early adopter of O3b MEO growing, while unlocking more
and more opportunities for MNOs in the DRC, this time taking advantage of the
multi-orbit network that combines the benefits of MEO low-latency with the
incredible reach of GEO.”
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