International service provider Orange Group, along with its Senegalese subsidiary Sonatel, is partnering with satellite operator SES to deploy and manage the first O3b mPower gateway in Africa, allowing the African continent to enjoy easy access to high-performance and low-latency connectivity services. The three companies announced that the gateway for O3b mPOWER, SES’s next-generation medium earth orbit (MEO) communications system, will be located at the Sonatel teleport in the Senegalese territory of Gandoul among other local satellite antennas.
This very first O3b mPOWER gateway will be used by Sonatel and Orange to deliver high-performance, low-latency, and cloud-optimised connectivity services throughout Africa. SES will also use the gateway to support telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) functions for the O3b mPOWER fleet from an additional location and the first one in Africa. The terabit-scale O3b mPOWER constellation and its automated, advanced ground infrastructure can dynamically deliver multiple gigabits-per-second beams of managed data services to customers.
Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Executive Vice President of Orange International Networks, commented: ‘At Orange, we continue to believe that satellite remains a promising technology and that the many innovations it currently showcases will give it an increasingly growing position in the telecommunication field, in Africa as well as other countries that have more developed infrastructures such as Europe or North America. This is why we are particularly pleased of the consolidation of our partnership with SES which will add a major new component to Orange’s mission to build intelligent, open networks in order to foster usages and access to digital technologies for the greatest number of people.’
Previously, Orange announced in early 2020 that it was to be the first global telecom operator to integrate O3b mPOWER in its network to support the growing demand for connectivity in Africa, starting in the Central African Republic.