05 November 2019
Martin Jarrold, chief of international programme development, GVF
I want to look into the nature of the likely loss of opportunity for Africa resulting from the repeated threat from the mobile wireless sector as it again ramps-up its effort to displace satellite from its spectrum in various frequency bands.
The very existence of the threat does not make any practical sense at all – not for Africa, nor for anywhere where communications services are a commercial, developmental, educational, governmental, industrial, and societal imperative.
Africa, as elsewhere, continues to face a digital divide and satellite connectivity is crucial to narrowing it; to bridging it.
Why?
Only satellite can provide ubiquitous, low-cost, and high-speed connectivity beyond the boundaries of large cities and across regions with limited fixed or mobile coverage.
The long-heralded promise that the landing of undersea optic cable would bring fibre deployment to all that require high bandwidth connectivity and bridge the divide has not happened, at least not beyond coastal urban centres.
Decades after undersea optic cable landed in Africa, 400 million are without internet access.
This figure increases substantially when considering access to fast Internet.
Over 300 million people live more than 50km away from a fibre or cable broadband connection, while 40% of sub-Saharan Africans still have no broadband.
It is very unlikely that this will ever be addressed by fibre because there is no compelling economic argument underpinning it.
Neither fibre nor the terrestrial mobile operators will bridge this connectivity divide.
They cannot guarantee their network deployments beyond high density areas because of investment challenges and CAPEX cuts.
That said, African countries illustrate the ever-growing benefits derived from access to satellite broadband, for example, the accelerated beneficial impact on national socio-economic progress which results from the orbiting of high throughput satellite (HTS) technology, capable of delivering significant performance improvements, with more reliable coverage for users and at a lower cost.
There is evidence demonstrating the benefits of broadband digital transformation for economic growth.
Studies on the impact of fixed and mobile broadband indicate that a 1% increase in broadband penetration leads to an increase of 0.08 to 0.15% in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). [‘The Economic Contribution of Broadband, Digitisation & ICT Regulation’, ITU]
Ensuring this connectivity growth requires that government policies and regulators’ approaches to rules should guarantee access to necessary amounts of satellite radio spectrum; promoting a framework of regulatory certainty which will facilitate satellite’s role in broadband deployment.
Many existing African communications networks depend on C-band satellite links.
These provide reliable, uninterrupted communications, unaffected by signal attenuation resulting from heavy rainfall.
Euroconsult – the Paris-based consultancy – analysis indicates that C-band makes up over 58% of all satellite capacity used in Africa, with over 80% of C-band capacity over the continent in use at any point in time.
However, even this figure underestimates the importance of C-band to the continent’s networks.
Satellites currently procured by operators intended for coverage of sub-Saharan Africa all carry a C-band payload representing 20-70% of the total satellite capacity.
Multiple satellite operators expect a five to 8% increase in demand for their African C-band offerings, so this figure will increase.
Whilst services relying on C-band in Africa cannot be easily replicated in other satellite bands (nor by terrestrial means) that does not mean that Ku-band and Ka-band are unimportant to the continent.
Ku-band benefits Africa by providing coverage to large geographical areas and is critically important, for example, for (live) broadcast, mobile backhaul, and broadband connectivity, together with aeronautical and maritime services.
The characteristics of this frequency band allows satellites to cover overlapping areas, making it well-suited for covering vast geographical areas and challenging terrain.
The band is getting increasingly congested as mobile and data traffic continues to grow and if terrestrial applications are allocated additional sections of this band the congestion could prevent satellites from providing their current services.
Addressing Ku-band congestion, the last ITU WRC in 2015 allocated 250 MHz in the uplink and 250 MHz in the downlink for Fixed Satellite Services (FSS) in ITU Region 1, which includes Africa.
Adding IMT services to this band would risk making the WRC-15 decision obsolete and increase congestion.
Ka-band is vitally important too.
Across the continent Ka-band satellite connectivity impacts education, entrepreneurship, health services and emergency response in rural areas in a way no other technology can.
With Ka-band, like C- and Ku-bands, we have connected the unconnected in parts of African that no terrestrial technology has been able or is even interested in reaching.
The space segment is one thing; ground segment issues are vital too, as are the segment’s technology trends that are bringing to market smaller antenna aperture sizes and phased array and other flat panel technologies that are less expensive than their predecessors.
Here, too, policy and regulation should facilitate satellite access by favouring class, or blanket, licensing regimes, whereby one single authorization covers all similar equipment and types of service.
Additionally, as a general principle, regulatory fees should be set to a minimum, i.e., focused on the recouping of administrative costs, but avoiding customs duties on equipment imports, type approvals fees and licensing charges that are used as a mechanism for national treasury revenues.
These customs duties serve to disincentivise the deployment of satellite communications infrastructure and thereby slow the growth of internet connectivity and economic growth.
Satellite supports an expanding range of applications.
The commercial, developmental, educational, governmental, industrial, and societal imperative referenced above can be delivered by satellite… serving all Africa’s nations.
Where services such as banking, education, healthcare, humanitarian assistance & disaster recovery, government communications, rural telephony and other networks are beyond terrestrial services, all function over satellite.
And now we include the tens of billions of device connectivity of the Internet of things (IoT) and of connected vehicle solutions.
Satellite connectivity bridges divides – bringing digital transformation to fight the iniquity of inequality and poverty for the people of an entire continent.
By Martin Jarrold, chief of international programme development, GVF
