O3b's "fiber in the sky" to provide broadband to rural , uncovered half of the world

With East Africa being the last region in Africa to receive undersea fiber connectivity in mid 2009, it is largely taken for granted that most of Africa now has access to broadband connectivity. That, however is far from the case. Senior Vice President Commercial for SES Africa, Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, says there are at least 300 million Africans who remain out of coverage of existing broadband technology, and the number could be as high as 500 million to 700 million.

Globally, slightly less than half of the population is estimated to be uncovered by existing networks, leading to the formation of a consortium known as the Other 3 billion, or O3b in short. O3b looks to provide connectivity to the uncovered half of the global population, most of whom are located in the developing/emerging markets of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The O3b consortium consists of SES, the satellite firm as majority shareholder, with other shareholders including financiers such as the financing arm of Mo Ibrahim Foundation and notable firms such as Google, who is a minor shareholder. Google is notable here for their effort to get Internet to every part of the globe which ensures their advertising network reaches as many eyes as possible.

O3b is looking to tackle the challenges of providing connectivity through current satellite infrastructure by coming up with an innovative set up. Rather than have geostationary satellites - satellites that are fixed in one position providing coverage to a certain area of the globe - O3b plans to have rotary satellites situated around the equator.

The rotary satellites will be in their own orbit and will keep revolving around the earth, such that the portion of the earth's surface covered by each satellite will change every few hours. A number of satellites will be deployed, such that at any one time, the target areas mentioned above are covered by one of the O3b satellites.

By virtue of their positioning and set up, the O3b satellites will be much closer to earth than the current satellites. This may lead to a reduced area of coverage - Ibrahima says each satellite will cover a diameter of 700 kilometres of the earth's surface - though this will be offset by the high bandwidth that the satellites will provide, 700 megabits per second to 1.2 gigabits per second, with the capacity set to rise in the future as technology improves.

source: www.allafrica.com