Bandwidth for Africa

[rpm]

Bandwidth for Africa

Three new satellite projects for Africa

 

[ldmelsa]

lots of stuff happening
compare this to 10 years ago
things are certainly changing

 

[Kloon]

Wonder if IS is going to move away from Sat BW when new cable goes live. I suppose fibre will be allot cheaper than Sat BW, but then again with all the Sat projects this will also drop.

 

[portcullis]

When the dotcom bubble burst, they were advertising half finished satellites in Communications Africa for a couple of million dollars. It wouldn't surprise me if those birds are the ones that are now being prepared to be sent into space.

 

[Kkkurupt]

I thought optic fibres were going to replace satellites. May be im wrong or misinformed

 

[Rouxenator]

Oh my, the gamer kiddiez won't like reading this.
They are [-]lactose[/-] latency intolerant.

 

[portcullis]

I thought optic fibres were going to replace satellites. May be im wrong or misinformed

Cable is king, but satellite is a relatively inexpensive way of getting reasonable quality bandwidth to remote locations.

 

[InTheCube]

The article title reads "Bandwidth for Africa".

So then what the hell does this Sumbandila satellite have to do with bandwidth for Africa?

Another satellite that is expected to launch next March is Sumbandila. The satellite, built by SunSpace, will be optimised to take scientific images of South Africa.

Who writes this crap?

 

[tjunyat]

Wow, 2010 is gearing up to be the quintessential year of "stuff happening" in SA.
I just hope that even some of the projects get off the ground and don't all falter in the quagmire that is our guavamunt's lack of foresight.

 

[dabbler]

What happened to EASSy? Are they going to be operational by 2010?

 

[Tweak]

A proposed alternative to the geostationary relay is a special solar-powered ultralight airplane, which would fly along a circular path above a fixed ground location, operating under autonomous computer control at a height of approximately 20.000 meters. Onboard batteries would charge from solar panels covering the wings during the daylight hours, and would provide power to the plane during the night. Ground-based satellite dishes would relay signals off the plane, resulting in a greatly reduced roundtrip signal latency of only 0.12 milliseconds.

some interesting facts about satelites, really wish they could actually implement this someday.

 

[Pyro]

Yip, the Google sats will be low earth orbit, which makes for lower latency.

Either way, the satellites takes some of the load off the cables, and are more suited for some applications, mainly remote locations.

Either way, it's an additional pipe to join the price fight.