06 Sep 2024
Digitalisation holds immense potential to transform the economic landscape of Africa, increasing opportunities for trade and investment as well as supporting social and community development in underserved areas. Sixteen landlocked countries with limited GSM services can benefit significantly from reliable satellite communications, which complement existing terrestrial and sub-marine networks. It is noteworthy that these less connected countries especially depend on humanitarian support. Satcom improves the efficiency of humanitarian missions, supporting relief efforts, including access to public services, e-learning and e-health in underserved areas. The idea of extending digitalisation to underserved areas is not new, yet these efforts have struggled to achieve mass adoption. Humanitarian operations rely heavily on data access, with most modern applications demanding high-speed, low-latency connectivity. Traditionally, traffic-consuming apps were served by VSAT systems. With speeds of just 1.5-2 Mbps, legacy VSAT services were limited in the number of digital processes they could support simultaneously. Today, 220 Mbps satellite networks have significantly expanded the digital spectrum of humanitarian operations. New network management solutions are emerging, aimed at unlocking flexibility for aid operations and maximising productivity over each Mbps in use. IT teams can now manage usage centrally with satellite credits reallocated between missions as and when required. Various missions within the same NGO can be connected to a single account with a shared data pool across all deployments. To learn more, read this recent publication by Nabil Ben Soussia, Group CCO at IEC Telecom, for Intelligent CIO Africa.
