Objectives of the service
The aim of the SatSoHoAfrica “Satellite Services for SoHo in Africa” project is to design, develop, validate and pilot the necessary technological and service elements to allow the provision of competitive broadband internet services to Small-office-Home-office (SoHo) users in Sub-Saharan Africa. This segment is composed of a variety of micro-enterprises, such as farms, tourist lodges and hotels that have typically less than 10 employees, limited resources and highly variable and hardly predictable data-traffic needs, which tend to change with their seasonal activities (e.g. agriculture market and tourism seasons).
CHALLENGES
Current Status
The Final Review of the original (plus CCN#1) activities was successfully done in October 2015.
The prime contractor has submitted a CCN2 (about 1MEUR cost / 500 kEUR price) to develop and pilot a tailored solution of the SoHo service with the WiFi Hot-Spot features for education in 40 schools in Ghana.
The CCN#2 activities were kicked-off in November 2015 and the Baseline Design Review milestone took successfully place on 9 December 2015 with a preliminary iteration of the user and system requirements related to the hot-spot service.
All 40 pilot sites (i.e. schools in Ghana) have been successfully installed and validated for the Videoconference service, which is operationally used by the teachers and students.
The development of the Hot Spot service and of the multicasting monitoring tools, which include an interface to the Solar Panel/battery sub-system, have been finalised and the Site Acceptance Test was achieved on 21 April 2016. Since then, e-learning activities have been conducted in all schools, and the Hotspot has been used with lots of enthusiasm by the local communities.
The Final review of the CCN#2 activities successfully took place on the 25th of July 2017.
The results of pilot are very satisfactory, mainly for the pilot school customers that greatly appreciated the new service features.
All 40 eLearning Pilot sites are fully operational and Varkey became a SatADSL long-term committed commercial customers.
In addition, the projects allowed Varkey to appreciate the usefulness of the hotspot feature for the local populations and as a conclusion decides to implement such hotspots as a baseline for all its future projects.
Important project spin-offs are expected in the coming years. Indeed, for NGOs active in remote areas in Africa and already having their own satellite communication network the possibility of using this network for supporting local populations and generating some revenues can be very much appealing. The result of this project is not only be applicable to eLearning projects, but also to alternative users active in remote areas such as hospitals, radios or postal offices. SatADSL is currently discussing with several of these alternative users.
Prime Contractor(s)
Subcontractor(s)
