Satellite services provider SpeedCast International has announced a multi-million dollars agreement with Pakistan telco Multinet Pakistan that will enable Multinet to add satellite communications to its private network offerings. SpeedCast has also announced a deal to use the O3b satellite network to provide services to Kiribati.
In its multi-year service agreement with Multinet, SpeedCast will provide enterprise connectivity via two iDirect Hubs to be deployed in Pakistan enabling Multinet to offer reliable connectivity to the most remote areas of Pakistan.
SpeedCast's O3b based service in Kiribati will be provided to consumers, businesses and government customers by Amalgamated Telecom Holdings (Kiribati) Limited (ATHKL), a subsidiary of Amalgamated Telecom Holdings of Fiji.
SpeedCast said: ""The Republic of Kiribati has a population of about 100,000 living on 33 atolls and island across 3.5 million square km of ocean. O3b is the ideal solution as the dispersed geography makes laying undersea fiber cables unreasonably expensive and time-consuming. Existing geostationary (GEO) satellites can't match the O3b network's high throughput and low latency, which is necessary for modern e-commerce, e-government, e-education and e-Health applications."" (O3b's satellites orbit at 8,062km above the Earth and have a latency of less than 150mS -25 percent that of the geostationary satellite systems presently serving Kiribati.)
Kiribati is in the final stages of testing the O3b link, and will first deploy the service to Tarawa, the largest island in the country. SpeedCast said: ""The multi-year agreement provides flexibility to expand capacity where required, to ensure ATHKL can provide high performance connectivity for HD video, e-commerce, online education, or cloud services.""
It added: ""The announcement follows the expansion of SpeedCast's O3b-based infrastructure in the Pacific, with customers in Port Moresby and Lae, PNG; Christmas Island, Australia; and Solomon Islands, already benefiting from O3b's high throughput low latency advantage.""