Ka-band technology continues to boost satellite services, as recent news from Africa and Latin America indicates.
SatADSL, a leading provider of professional VSAT and secure private networks via satellite in Africa, has launched commercial Ka-band broadband services in sub-Saharan Africa.
Utilizing Avanti’s High Throughput Satellite (HTS) Hylas 4, the new offering will provide consumer and corporate business connectivity offered by internet service providers through SatADSL’s platform-as-a-service (PAAS) solution, a cloud-based service delivery platform (C-SDP).
This offering aims to significantly improve the penetration of high-capacity internet in the region, notably where other forms of connectivity are unavailable. The new services are expected to be running by the end of this year.
Meanwhile Hispasat, a Spanish satellite communications operator, is now offering a new service to the Mexican telecommunications market. It too aims to bring broadband connectivity to areas of limited coverage.
Hispasat’s Amazonas 5 satellite, which has been operational since last November, includes HTS (high throughput satellite) technology and has seven coverage beams over Mexico in Ka-band. This satellite covers 77 per cent of the Mexican population and will be able to reach 100 million people – or approximately 27.2 million homes.
The growth in popularity of Ka-band for satellite services is hardly surprising. Coverage is more concentrated; this means the power of the satellite can be directed over smaller regions. Higher bandwidth and the possibility of reusing frequencies allows for the use of HTS technology, and the increased throughput and higher speeds that implies, although some attenuation in heavy rainfall areas is a potential problem in this band. However, unlike services in some other bands the user terminals required in order to receive these signals are compact and easy to deploy.
