Praised for its work in delivering the industry’s first commercial implementation of an ONAP-powered platform, specifically Amdocs’ NFV SD-WAN Package on Microsoft Azure public cloud, the 2020 Global Carrier Award judges described this winning entry as “a very powerful and innovative solution delivered via satellite bringing clear benefits to consumers providing seamless connectivity through a myriad of satellites”.
This winning technology deployment aside, SES has continued to innovate and collaborate across the space. At the start of the year, the company partnered with Southern Cross Cables Limited (SCCL) leveraging SES’ satellite connectivity services to upgrade its Southern Cross cable network.
Specifically, SCCL will use SES’s O3b constellation of medium earth orbit (MEO) satellites to connect remote stations on the incoming Southern Cross NEXT cable network during its commissioning phase.
Laster that month, SES also formed a partnership with SSi Canada, a developer-operator of QINIQ broadband and SSi Mobile services in Nunavut, to deliver new satellite capacity in North Canada.
All 25 communities of Nunavut will benefit from the multi-year agreement and added capacity, a need further driven by the Covid-19 crisis leading to an unprecedented need for reliable internet and mobile communications as more locals work and study from home.
Fast forward to April and Kazakhstan’s Republican Center for Space Communications (RCSC) inked a Memorandum of Understanding with SES to explore satellite service agreements. Specifically, RCSC will explore using SES’s O3b mPOWER constellation scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2021.
More recently, Capacity broke the news that SES plans to co-locate four of the eight sites that will be used to manage SES’s new fleet of satellites with Microsoft Azure data centres.
SES intends its new O3b mPower satellites to be used for data, taking the company further away from its TV broadcast origins.
“The bandwidth to a single [customer’s] antenna will be from tens of megabits a second up to 10Gbps,” Stewart Sanders, SES’s executive VP of technology told Capacity. “And we can keep scaling: we can put more satellites up.”
Earlier this month, the company joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect Delivery Partner program certifying SES’s ability to connect its customers directly to their AWS services over its network of multi-orbit satellites.
To nominate your company and projects for the 2021 Global Carrier Awards, click here
