Following the successful introduction of TelkomInternet via satellite, Telkom is now taking its SpaceStream Express product into Africa.
“We have started trials in several African countries and expect to introduce a full commercial service early in the new year,” Telkom’s chief sales and marketing officer, Nombulelo Moholi, said on Tuesday.
Pilot projects are under way with Intelsat and Advance Telecoms, who have experience in markets outside South Africa and will be working with resellers in many countries.
Depending on the local regulatory environment in the different countries, resellers could be the incumbent telecommunications operator, or newly licensed entities.
“Telkom SpaceStream Express is an extremely versatile product offering access to the internet via TelkomInternet, which is hosted in South Africa or any other ISP who wishes to come on board,” Moholi said.
Packages are available to offer download speeds from 64 kilobytes per second (kbps) to 512kbps.
“The Telkom initiative supports the Nepad [New Partnership for Africa’s Development] process as it offers businesses in Africa the opportunity to get fast and reliable access to the internet, a service most businesses cannot do without,” she said. “We should also not forget the tremendous educational opportunities.”
The service will be hosted on a Skyblaster 360E satellite hub station from Gilat Satellite Networks and enter the Telkom network to connect to the worldwide web at Telkom’s earth station at Hartebeeshoek near Pretoria.
Telkom introduced two SpaceStream products into South Africa in October this year: SpaceStream Express and SpaceStream Office.
“Both products have been well received and roll-out is in full swing,” Moholi said.
SpaceStream Express offers download speeds in four packages from 64kbps to 512 kbps. SpaceStream Office provides internet access at a download speed of 64kbps plus up to four telephone connections.
Both products provide always-available access to the internet and e-mail services with no call charges. In addition to internet access, SpaceStream Office provides up to four telephone lines, which also support fax and payphones.
Moholi said the service is intended for periodic use of e-mail, newsgroups, file transfers, internet chat, instant messaging and web browsing.
“It is not suited for extensive virtual private network usage, video and voice over IP, remote access, gaming, hosting web or ftp servers or applications with heavy upload traffic. It is also not designed for high-volume sending such as excessive e-mail attachments or other applications such as hosting web servers and running peer-to-peer applications,” she explained.
Users are allocated bandwidth on a sub-segment known as a “transponder”, and have to share the satellite capacity. This means that they will have to contend for their “fair share” during busy times. Hence each access package is associated with a cap on data sent and received. Additional bandwidth can be purchased should the cap be reached.
“This is intended to keep the costs down, but at the same time maintain a good browsing experience for all customers and, very importantly, prevent abuse of the system,” said Moholi.