SES, a Luxembourg satellite telecommunications company, has announced plans to expand its Medium-Earth orbit (MEO) constellation in 2025 to deliver increased bandwidth to its African customers.
The initiative targets African enterprises and telecommunications operators, addressing the continent’s growing demand for reliable, high-speed connectivity.
The expansion will involve the addition of three satellites in 2025 and two more in 2026, further expanding the eight O3b mPOWER satellite network that provides its satellite connectivity services to most African countries.
SES, a Luxembourg satellite telecommunications company, has announced plans to expand its Medium-Earth orbit (MEO) constellation in 2025 to deliver increased bandwidth to its African customers.
The initiative targets African enterprises and telecommunications operators, addressing the continent’s growing demand for reliable, high-speed connectivity. The expansion will involve the addition of three satellites in 2025 and two more in 2026, further expanding the eight O3b mPOWER satellite network that provides its satellite connectivity services to most African countries.
These satellites, operating at approximately 9000 kilometres, are designed to provide low-latency and high-throughput connectivity, making them ideal for supporting various applications from mobile backhaul to enterprise networking.
We’re adding incremental bandwidth into the O3b mPOWER network.
You need six satellites to have a full global equatorial service, which covers the whole of Africa, so we already have the full coverage.
But what we’re doing with the latest two satellites is adding more bandwidth into the network,” Simon Gatty Saunt, SES VP of sales for Europe and Africa, told Connecting Africa in an interview.
SES has currently sold out all its current bandwidth capacity to Orange, a telecom operator in the Central African Republic. However, with the launch of two new satellites, SES will gain additional bandwidth to support Moov Africa, its second customer in the country.
Additionally, SES is implementing a LEO-MEO-GEO model to connect more rural and remote areas or places where natural disasters disrupt fibre optic networks, requiring urgent connectivity restoration.
SES also added that through commercial agreements with other operators, such as Vodacom, the company is integrating LEO services into its solutions to meet the needs of government and cruise customers.
Source: https://spaceinafrica.com/2025/02/12/ses-to-expand-its-meo-constellation-to-increase-bandwidth-for-africas-connectivity/
