09 March 2018

The four O3b satellites were built by Thales Alenia Space. PHOTO: BUSINESS WIRE

SES has successfully launched four new O3b satellites.

They were sent into space on board an Arianespace Soyuz rocket from Kourou, French Guiana on 9 March.

The new spacecraft will join SES’ existing constellation of 12 medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites in May.

They will be around 8,000km from the planet which is four times closer than their geostationary (GEO) counterparts.

As a result, it’s claimed the satellites will deliver connectivity with a “low latency, fibre-like” performance. 

Built by Thales Alenia Space, SES says the four new Ka-band satellites will enable it to meet the growing demand for bandwidth in the telecom, cloud, maritime, energy, and government markets.

By augmenting its O3b fleet, the company says it is scaling its “unique” ability to connect people, businesses, and continents with high performance communications anywhere on Earth.

“This is the beauty of our MEO constellation,” says Martin Halliwell, CTO, SES. “It can easily be scaled to respond to demand in an agile manner while beams can be allocated dynamically to where the demand is, and thus deliver low-latency connectivity where our customers need it.

"By augmenting our fleet, we will offer more throughput, more coverage, and more capabilities to our customers.”

This was the fourth O3b launch performed by Arianespace.

The first 12 satellites were launched by three Soyuz launch vehicles in 2013 and 2014, and the company has been contracted to launch another quartet during the first half of next year.