SkyeVine, Intelsat take triple play across Africa

TELECOMS

As Africa converts to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), in line with International Telecommunications Union (ITU) regulation, SkyeVine, a wholesale operator of data broadband services for Africa, is extending an offer to sub-Saharan broadcasters and Internet service providers (ISPs) to take advantage of the convergence of its platform with that of Intelsat New Dawn’s Free-to-Air DTH (Direct to Home) broadcast platform.

The relevance of this convergence is that there is now a clear opportunity to take a complete triple play bundle offering (voice, video and data) to the market.

Intelsat’s New Dawn DTH platform provides cost-efficient distribution of standard and high-definition programming across sub-Saharan Africa, using premium, non-pre-emptible capacity and the latest multiplexing technology through state-of-the-art DVB-S2 MPEG-4 encoding which allows multiple TV channels to be played at no charge to the end user.

It is a fully integrated service consisting of space segment, uplink chain, multiplexing and encoding, standards conversion and hosting. It is designed for African regional programmers, state broadcasters and international programmers launching free-to-air and pay TV channels originating from within Africa. The platform is currently starting to fill up with content from South Africa, Angola, Nigeria and Ivory Coast.

Uplink facilities are provided through the Globecast South Africa Teleport, located in Johannesburg, with strategic access to the growing media market on the continent. This teleport boasts fully redundant fibre connectivity to all major broadcasters, news agencies and production houses in South Africa.

Anton Kotze, Managing Executive for SkyeVine, says the company has combined its capacity on Intelsat New Dawn with state-of-the-art Newtec triple play infrastructure.

”We have also fully integrated operating and billing systems to allow African ISPs to rapidly deploy up to four megabits per second of premium, unshaped Internet services to customers, eliminating the need for these customers to develop their own management systems,” says Kotze.

The benefits of this affordable prepaid Internet availability for consumers/small businesses include high performance bandwidth, quick deployment and relocation, no cable theft and accommodation of data, voice and video traffic.

Access service provision is based on an attractive billing option, which includes monthly Gigabyte bundles with top-up option, time-of-day discount benefits and no fixed-term contracts.

The SkyeVine Internet Gateway is hosted on a world-class tier 4 facility and Intelsat New Dawn allows ubiquitous Direct-to-Home distribution of broadcasting content, Voice over IP and Internet access to sub-1 metre dishes throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

“With fully redundant fiber access to the Internet breakout point in South Africa, we have made quality Internet access much more affordable. Both the Intelsat New Dawn and SkyeVine platforms have been purposefully designed to allow broadcasters and ISPs to seamlessly converge the offerings of both platforms, enabling all services to be received using a single antenna,” Kotze adds.