Helping Africa Unleash its Digital Potential

The telecoms market in Africa has taken great strides in improving its digital connectivity in recent years – and there are encouraging signs for its future.

Africa has seen the fastest percentile growth in accessing the Internet of all continents over the past 15 years, rising from 2.1% in 2005 to 24.4% in 2018. Yet there is further progress to be made as it seeks to provide accessible, affordable and reliable internet access to all of its 1.3 billion inhabitants.

This target is underlined by the Digital Economy Initiative for Africa’s aim to “ensure that every individual, business and government in Africa will be digitally enabled by 2030”, as it looks to satisfy a growing dependence on internet access. The cost of such a project is estimated to be $100bn.

Moreover, from recent studies, it appears that investments on telecom infrastructure in Africa have the highest return on investment in comparison to all others infrastructure investments.

Levelling the digital landscape

Reaching that level of connectivity doesn’t come without its challenges, not least geographically. Isolated, rural and sometimes remote regions, as well as the urban powerhouses within the continent’s 54 countries, are spread out over a land area of 11.7 million square miles – three times greater than that of the United States – underlining the need for satellite connectivity.

Among its key benefits, satellite can cover vast geographical areas of varied terrains, allow for a quick and easy deployment of services and, importantly, is cost-effective.

As a market leading managed satellite service provider, SatADSL is widely recognized for providing Ka-band satellite services in Africa’s consumer market where it has established 80 local ISP partners and distributors across the region over the past decade. We are now expanding into the enterprise market through our cloud-based services delivery platform (C-SDP).

Ka-band enters enterprise market

Ka-band, usually seen as a consumer product, is now entering the enterprise market with SatADSL. The high availability – 99.5%, which is similar to Ku-band –  of the new Ka-band HTS satellites combined with SatADSL’s innovative cloud platform, C-SDP, now allows local ISPs in Africa to offer to enterprises tailored services with guaranteed bandwidth in Ka band on the AVANTI Hylas4 and Yahsat AYal3 satellites (and will be exclusively available for professional solutions via SatADSL). The excellent quality of value-added services integrated into SatADSL’s C-SDP are now available to businesses using Ka-band, making SatADSL the ‘specialist in Ka-band business connectivity for the enterprise market’.

Through the platform all services offered by SatADSL are now available with Ka-Band. This includes online payment of vouchers, contended services, and SatADSL’s VNOFlex service – allowing Service Providers to dynamically allocate their VNO capacity among several sites that they manage. This demonstrates how this unique solution provides some of the most advanced characteristics available in the marketplace today.