Page 45 - SAMENA Trends - November-December 2022

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

Digicel PNG Bolsters Coverage with Additional

O3b Capacity From SES

Digicel PNG, part of Digicel Pacific, is parts of the country. It was noted that swift response in provisioning additional
reportedly enhancing its coverage in Papua during the disruption stemming from the capacity to enable us to plug urgent and
New Guinea (PNG) by leveraging SES’s O3b cable damage, SES had assisted Digicel unprecedented connectivity gaps,’ said
medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellite system with emergency bandwidth, providing Digicel PNG CEO Colin Stone, adding: ‘Our
to provide its customers with seamless an increase of 40% in high-performance, partnership with SES has been critical to
connectivity. In a press release regarding low-latency O3b services deployed not just disaster relief efforts in Papua
the development – which comes after across twelve sites throughout PNG to New Guinea, but in connecting remote
damage to the international Pipe Pacific keep communities connected. SES is populations across the Pacific region …
Cable (PPC) which resulted from a 7.7 also reported to have stepped in with We look forward to exploring the enhanced
magnitude earthquake in September 2022 an incremental 3Gbps of capacity and capabilities of SES’s O3b mPOWER satellite
– it was suggested that the additional additional ground equipment to enable system to fortify network connections thus
O3b services will continue to help Digicel Digicel to restore its network connectivity minimizing network disruptions in the event
maintain connectivity during outages and critical communications services for of future disasters.’
caused by such cable breaks while also both consumers and telecommunication
expanding coverage across the remote customers. ‘We are grateful for SES’s

SES Rockets to Next-Gen Birds with SpaceX Launch

SpaceX successfully launched two of after the first generation launched in 2013. chief strategy and product officer for SES,
SES’ second-generation medium earth SES CEO Steve Collar stated in a press told Mobile World Live that six of the birds
orbit satellites (MEO) that will increase briefing the birds would be commercial- could cover all of Earth, but the company
the beams from 10 per bird to more than ly operational in Q3 2023 after achieving plans to deploy a total of 11 in its satellite
5,000 in an effort to provide global connec- their 8,000 kilometers MEO orbits. The constellation. “We’re building a big global
tivity across numerous verticals. The two new satellites will enable roundtrip laten- telco wholesale edge,” he stated. The sat-
Boeing-built O3b mPOWER MEO satellites cy of less than 150 milliseconds to deliver ellites connect to SES’ ground stations,
blasted-off 16 December from Florida’s global speeds from 10Mb/s to gigabits to some of which are located in Microsoft
Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop government agencies, energy companies, Azure data centers to enable low laten-
a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The satellites cruise lines, enterprises, mobile operators, cy at the edge for mobile operators. SES
were in development for the past five years ships and planes. John-Paul Hemingway, also has a multi-cloud strategy in place
with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google
Cloud and Oracle, but its primary partner is
Azure. “We built a whole bunch of our gate-
ways collocated with Azure data centers,
so our customers are directly connected
back to Azure the minute they use mPOW-
ER,” Collar stated. “They’re coming back to
one of our gateways and they have direct
access to Azure services.” Mobile opera-
tors will have access to a range of virtual
network functions on Azure and AWS mar-
ketplaces when the satellites are live. The
satellite provider will also use the mPOW-
ER birds to connect to the network cloud at
the edge to deliver compute and storage.
Hemingway outlined several primary use
cases for operators that will be empow-
ered by the new satellite cluster including
virtual 5G instances.

45 NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2022