Strides towards affordable satellite broadband in SA were made in the first hour of today when the Y1B satellite was successfully launched in Kazakhstan, 18 minutes after midnight.
The Y1B satellite, which Vox Telecom will use for its YahClick “low-cost satellite Internet broadband” service, will cover SA with six Ka band spot beams and, according to Vox, is set to play an important role in providing telecommunications infrastructure for the country's rural and remote areas. This is the first Ka band satellite service for SA.
A project of Abu Dhabi-based Yahsat, which launched its Y1A communications satellite a year ago, YahClick will roll out commercially from July. Vox Telecom says the service will not only bring more capacity to SA, but also distribute capacity to consumers and SMEs in under-serviced areas. “Until now, satellite Internet has been prohibitively expensive in SA. Vox is going to change that with YahClick.”
Satellite stats
At launch, the Y1B weighed more than 6 000kg and will have a spacecraft power of 14kW at the end of its 15-year design lifetime.
YahClick is based on Ka band (19GHz to 40GHz) technology, part of the K band of the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and only recently available to the public.
Ka band satellites transmit many highly-focused, overlapping “spot beams”, each covering a relatively small area. The company explains: “What this basically means is that microwave signals are used to carry the Internet over satellite to your home where they are received by a dish receiver (like DSTV) giving you full wireless satellite broadband Internet.”
Based on this technology, YahClick will offer download speeds of up to 5Mbps and upload speeds of up to 3Mbps. Vox Telecom product manager, Jacques Visser, says a mid-range package offering 1Mbps download speed, 256Kbps upload speed and 200MB usage per day will probably cost less than R500 a month.
“We have developed packages to suit a wide range of users, from the home user who just wants to download e-mail and browse the Web, to businesses who may need to transfer hundreds of GBs a day.”
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