UP and DOWN in Africa: coverage is suitable for national/regional satellite communications in or between Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho.
Price for long term satellite transponder bandwidth
lease: US$4400 per month per MHz. Minimum contract is 12 months lease
of 2 MHz bandwidth. Start up requires two months advance payment.
For licensed 14 GHz transmit sites only.
Price and availability are subject to change. This page was last edited 1st Feb 2007.
Ideal for: National and nearby country VoIP phone calls. Also, sound radio and TV distribution to regional or rural transmitter sites.
Not suitable for: International phone calls or international internet access, except via your own hub transit routing.
There is 12.5 MHz of transponder bandwidth for sale in this South Africa regional Ku band spot beam.
The downlink is high power, 49 to 50 dBW saturated EIRP over the majority of the coverage pattern. Since the beam is small, the uplink satellite receive performance (G/T) is correspondingly high and coupled with an appropriate satellite transponder gain setting is ideal for small dish VSAT operation.
The connectivity of the beam is UP and DOWN in the same beam, so you can see your own transmit signals. This makes it ideal for mesh networks or hub/star networks for services such as Africa to Africa VoIP phone calls. The connectivity is also suited to sound radio or digital TV programme distribution to regional or rural transmitter local sites.
The connectivity is not suitable for worldwide internet access or worldwide phone calls unless you provide additional terrestrial connectivity via sub-sea optic fibre cable connection point at your own teleport.
The earth station elevation angles in Africa are all well in excess of the 10 deg elevation limit which means that operation in moderate rain will be possible. Ku band does suffer from rain fades and you need to allow more rain margin in your link budgets for the same percentage outage times per annum as for C band.
To achieve the highest capacity and thus lowest cost per phone call I recommend using dish sizes like 2.4m instead of 90cm and 1.2m dishes. This will enable higher order modulation such as 8-QAM and possibly 16-QAM, using modems such as Vipersat CDM-570L
You may need to provide:
2 sites intercommunicating with each other.
A few or many sites, all intercommunicating.
1 large teleport hub site and many remote sites.
1 large transmit hub and many receive only sites (broadcasting)
The figure below shows use being made of capacity in satellite transponders configured with different interconnectivity. The first transponder is connected from the Africa beam to the USA beam, and the centre transponder from USA to Africa. This pair is suitable for internet access. The third transponder shows the capacity for Africa to Africa connectivity, suitable for domestic VoIP calls.
Satellite transponder plan for Africa network of 3 VSAT sites providing both internet access and local domestic interconnectivity for VoIP.
The three green carriers are uplink carriers going from three VSAT sites to the USA. The large red carrier is the downlink, from the USA, shared by all three sites. The Orange carriers form mesh connectivity between the three sites to allow direct VoIP calls without double satellite hop. Each site would need two CDM570L modems and a 2 channel demodulator CDM562L, providing for 2 transmit carriers and 3 receive carriers, plus one spare receive demodulator.
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