Despite a few predictions that demand for satellite would start to drop away as the amount of operational fibre in Africa increased, the opposite has occurred.
During 2014 demand for satellite capacity in Africa will continue to increase from traditional applications such as cellular backhaul, remote BTS connectivity and broadcasting as well as in industries such as oil, gas and mining. And, of course, satellite is key when it comes to building redundancy into the network.
Good news for satellite users is that we expect a significant fall in prices as new satellites are launched in 2014 and new fiber routes are penetrating the countries.
Improvements in compression techniques used by the smart satellite providers will also reduce bandwidth requirements, savings which will be passed onto end-users.
Quality of service will continue to be an issue although the forward-thinking providers have already introduced Fair Access Policies (FAP) with guaranteed Committed Information Rates (CIRs guarantee customers pre-determined amounts of bandwidth at all times regardless of how busy the shared link gets).
Once again 2014 will bring a myriad of changes to the African telecoms market as countries grow richer and continue to invest in their infrastructure. It certainly is an exciting market full of opportunities.
Dan Zajicek is CEO of Gilat Satcom.
