Provision of competitive broadband internet services to Small-office/Home-office (SoHo) users in Sub-Saharan Africa

The aim of the Satellite Services for Small-office/Home-office in Africa (SatSoHoAfrica) project is to design, develop, validate and pilot the necessary technological and service elements to allow the provision of competitive broadband internet services to Small-office/Home-office (SoHo) users in Sub-Saharan Africa. This segment is composed of a variety of micro-enterprises, such as farms, tourist lodges and hotels that have typically less than 10 employees, limited resources and highly variable and hardly predictable data-traffic needs, which tend to change with their seasonal activities (e.g. agricultural market and tourism seasons). In order to meet the specific SoHo community needs, SatADSL develops a set of “pay as you go” services that are volume-based, do not require monthly subscription and are not subject to any volume reset, which is instead enforced in the Business2Business (B2B) high end professional services already provided by SatADSL (for more info see SatFinAfrica project web page). SatSoHoAfrica develops and validates a set of enhancements and applications that allows SatADSL to target an addressable market of the order of 50,000 terminals in the time frame 2015-2020. The proposed activities include the adaptation and integration of management features enabling an effective and low cost “pay as you go” modality for a large number of users and terminals, covering accounting, fault monitoring and help desk, customisable front end, and the inclusion of a protected transmission modality to accommodate security type applications (such as alarms, useful to remote farmers that are often assaulted by burglars). The SoHo services are to be sold via several local African distributors who re-sell the service to their final SoHo customers, on behalf of SatADSL as currently already done in the offered B2B services. Beside the Ku-band Newtec Sat3Play platform already used by SatADSL, the proposed project integrates and validates a Ka-band Sat3Play platform using the multi-beam payload of Avanti HYLAS 2 deployed over Sub-Saharan Africa.