Quantis to use Intelsat EpicNG to enhance broadband services in Africa

Intelsat, operator of the world’s first globalised network, powered by its leading satellite backbone, announced that Quantis Global, one of the leading broadband service providers in Europe and Northern Africa, signed an agreement to enhance and expand the Quantis network using services provided by Intelsat EpicNG high-throughput satellites and IntelsatOne Flex services, bringing higher performing broadband services across the region.

Quantis will incorporate services from two Intelsat EpicNG satellites, Intelsat 33e and Intelsat 37e, and use Intelsat’s managed services offering, IntelsatOne Flex for Enterprise, which delivers high-quality, global, enterprise-grade, wholesale Mbps service. The network leverages Intelsat teleports and will serve NGOs, enterprise, embassies, the oil and gas sector, and maritime customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“We added high-throughput services in order to meet the growing needs of our existing customers as well as position for new revenue-generating services that require higher throughput satellite services,” said Aquilino Antuña, CEO of Quantis.

“After reviewing many options, it was clear that Intelsat EpicNG and IntelsatOne Flex for Enterprise offer the best path to immediately deliver more bandwidth and cost-efficient commercial solutions to our blue-chip corporate, NGO and maritime customers. The global footprint of the Intelsat solution also means we can support our growth strategies in the countries where we currently operate as well as quickly respond to new market opportunities anywhere in the world.”

IntelsatOne Flex for Enterprise is a managed wholesale service that allows regional and global enterprise network service providers to efficiently incorporate high-throughput satellite technology into new and existing private networks. With a web-based network operations interface, IntelsatOne Flex removes the complexities and cost of network expansion, and allows you to benefit from our continuous investments in innovative technologies.

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Intelsat launched the first two satellites in the Intelsat EpicNG platform in 2016. Intelsat 29e serves the Americas, and Intelsat 33e began operations over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia on January 29th. Intelsat 37e is scheduled to begin service in 2018. The flexibility of Intelsat EpicNG’s open architecture and backward-compatible design enables service providers like Quantis to seamlessly transition to Intelsat EpicNG and immediately realise efficiency improvements, a signature of this high-throughput platform.

EpicNG spot beam footprints are shaped by standard multi-array antennas aboard the spacecraft. These beams range in bandwidth between 62.5 – 500MHz. Beam polarisation is regulated by the orientation of the beams’ feeds, and frequency ranges are isolated by uplink and downlink beam filters. The benefit of the more focused, concentrated beam is high forward and return gains, less power to transmit an RF signal and ability to utilise a smaller antenna to close the links. Also, a more asymmetric nature of the traffic is changing the way we operate. Lately we are seeing customers asking for 4-to-1 or a 6-to-1 ratio.

In order to get higher throughput from a specific orbital slot, you have to reuse the frequency band that you are assigned in that slot more times so that you can get more bits through the spacecraft. Frequency reuse is not new to Intelsat. Many are already familiar with the Intelsat 9 series spacecraft which delivers six-fold the frequency reuse at C-band achieved via hemispheric and regional coverage zones, resulting in 4Gbps throughput.

By dividing the available spectrum into geographically distributed segments that are using small, multi-spot uplink and downlink beams, one is able to effectively re-use the spectrum even more than with traditional spacecraft.

Applying traditional downlink monitoring methodology on EpicNG spacecraft would be inherently difficult and costly. EpicNG monitoring will, in fact, entail many different methods of monitoring which will provide varying degrees of detail for any particular type of application. Monitoring for EpicNG is significantly different than traditional satellites for good reason: if you look at the coverages for IS-29e, there are multiple beams serving the Atlantic Ocean. It would be very difficult to deploy monitoring stations in every beam in the middle of the Atlantic. The digital payload eliminates the need for every-beam monitoring stations, and we have more accurate and frequent data for measurement.

With sub-channel power telemetry the satellite sends power measurements for each of the 9,216 up-link and downlink sub-channels.

The Spectrum Monitoring System is a digital payload process which provides spectrum monitoring directly from the satellite. This is achieved with the creation of synchronised dynamic fan-out routes. This is a dedicated process which fans out groups of 24 sub-channels at a time which equates to 62.5 MHz of bandwidth.

Dwelling on each segment for approximately 200 milliseconds, the process cycles through all receive ports of the digital payload approximately once per minute. The fan-out routes are downlinked via the digital payload over a specified beam to be received and processed by a special synch channel receiver at the ground station, the SRMS. For IS-29e, the SRMS is implemented at the Mountainside Teleport.

“Intelsat EpicNG is delivering on the promise of high throughput satellite services with higher performance, better economics and simpler access,” said Jean-Philippe Gillet, Intelsat’s Vice President, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

“Our customers asked for a flexible, global platform for incorporating high throughput satellite services, and we responded with IntelsatOne Flex for Enterprise. This managed service accelerates time to market, allows service providers to be more responsive to end users, and expands their network with a robust and easily scalable broadband infrastructure.”

Intelsat operates the world’s first globalised network, delivering high-quality, cost-effective video and broadband services anywhere in the world. Intelsat’s globalised network combines the world’s largest satellite backbone with terrestrial infrastructure, managed services and an open, interoperable architecture to enable customers to drive revenue and reach through a new generation of network services.

Quantis is a satellite operator, belonging to the Eurona Wireless Telecom, specialising in providing broadband and broadcast services in a global scale. Headquartered in Madrid and with subsidiaries in Casablanca Nortis, Abidjan Quantis CI, Cotonou Quantis Benin and Santo Dominto Quantis Caribe.

Quantis provides teleports and terrestrial POPs, quality telecommunication services to more than 30,000 customers in Spain, Morocco, Europe and Africa. Quantis delivers services to broadcasters, telecommunication operators, NGOs, governments, utilities and oil companies. Both in Spain and Morocco, Quantis plays a role in solving the digital divide providing high quality satellite residential services to households and businesses in areas with no traditional broadband infrastructure.