Satellite Corporate services for Africa

With ARTES 3-4 Satcom Applications projects SatFinAfrica (https://artes-apps.esa.int/projects/satfinafrica) and SatSoHoAfrica (https://artes.esa.int/projects/satsohoafrica), SatADSL has already successfully launched several services (others are about to be demonstrated) in Africa dedicated to small to medium size companies or small sites of larger companies. The service platform of these two projects is based on the Sat3Play technology of Newtec and on the ASTRA2Connect platform of SES, both of which were originally tailored to the consumer market, and which have been successfully customised to offer an efficient and flexible solution for contended traffic and low to medium data rate in the return channel (from the remote terminals to the hub station). With SatCorpAfrica SatADSL extends its portfolio of services towards the market segment of “Professional Corporate Network” (also called Wide-Area-Network or “WAN”) with a set of attractive and flexible service offers. Targeted customers of WAN services are large and medium size enterprises operating in Africa in different business sectors, such as Oil&Gas, Construction and Media Broadcasting (e.g. local Business TV and local radio). These enterprises operate with Headquarters (HQ) in big cities and multiple subsidiary sites located in smaller cities. Thanks to the new services of SatCorpAfrica, end users have access to more cost effective technology with dedicated bandwidth at an affordable price and higher speeds in the return link. They also have access to Value-Added Services (VAS) related to the supervision of service quality and content management. They have the opportunity to have access to flexible tailor-made service/solutions that will meet both their requirements and budget. African distributors will increase their sales volumes and market share by targeting a wider range of end users with a wider range of requirements. They will have the opportunity to offer this range of services with a single service platform. The overall market of large and medium size enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa requiring WAN services is estimated at about 400,000 corporate network sites. The addressable market of SatCorpAfrica is defined as the number of sites outside big cities not yet connected by other professional VSAT service providers, which is estimated to be in the order of about 20% of the overall market, i.e. 80,000 sites.