O3B Details Plan for Satellite-Based Bandwidth For Africa

slash-sa writes "O3B Networks has been quietly preparing itself over the last 12 months for the moment last week when it announced that it was going to be offering cheap, low-latency satellite bandwidth that can cover any part of Africa by 2010. It has put in place early finance with Google, Liberty Global and HSBC. Here are more details from the entrepreneur behind the project, Greg Wyler."

Comments

Sell this short if you can. It will make you rich.

[viking80]

This can not be competitive in any way. A fiber costs very little to roll out, and there is good capacity in ocean fibers terminating in many African coastal cities. The only problem with fibers on land is theft. Anything valuable is stolen.

More than 90% of the population lives close to the coast.

To spend millions to build a complicated space based network to cover the poorest of the poorest 10% seems like a very poor investment. (By complicated I just mean that the satellites need to hand a connection between satellites as they orbit over Africa, as well as down linking via multiple satellites, and traffic based dynamic antenna configuration and aiming.)