The company used its Tiger-2 satellite, which was launched on 30 June on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
“Completing the [in-orbit commissioning] phase and the successful tests with our terminals in remote locations was a crucial step to start generating revenue via the satellite and progress the constellation with more satellites to be launched in early 2022,” said Qaise (pictured), founder and CEO of the company.
“As a result, we’re now close to signing a memorandum of understanding with a respected research institute to collaborate on satellite-based services in the Middle East and Africa that could be a first step in that direction,” he added.
OQ Technology says it is planning to launch 72 satellites over the next few years, designed to provide 5G IoT and machine to machine (M2M) communication.
OQ is now ready to start customer demonstrations, Qaise added. He said that the company is talking to “several potential customers interested in using the company’s satellite-based 5G IoT services”.
It plans to start commercial services for what it calls “latency-tolerant” low-power devices in 2022.
In an interview published in Capacity earlier this month, Qaise said that OQ plans to use its satellites to fill in coverage gaps for 5G services, aiming at customers in oil, gas, logistics, mining and defence.
“In addition to potential customers, we are also negotiating with cellular chip partners to scale up the satellite access capability to existing cellular IoT [internet of things] chips globally,” said Qaise now. “Our next step is starting service demonstrations with our potential customers and their use cases.”
OQ says it has also tested its terminals in the desert and for indoor usage. It “was able to send the terminal’s GPS location to the satellite from inside a fast-moving car without having a direct line of sight to the sky”, it added.
“Even when buried in the desert sand, the terminal was still sending signals to the satellite, making it ideal for many agricultural applications. While the high level of signal to noise ratio surpassed OQ’s high expectations.”
Qaise said: “Being able to track our terminals even indoors and covered by soil adds further possible services that we can offer to our customers. It opens the door for many potential use cases other satellite operators cannot provide. And it demonstrates the impact and possibilities of this new generation of 5G over satellite.”
