The Carrier and Wholesale Services division of e& (formerly the Etisalat Group) has announced a partnership with technology giant Microsoft and satellite operator SES to host the co-located SES O3b mPOWER and Microsoft ground station at Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE.
O3b mPOWER is SES’s second-generation medium earth orbit (MEO) system and will operate around 8,000 km above the earth’s surface. It will be fully operational in early 2023.
The partners say that this, the first O3b mPOWER ground station in the region, will facilitate one-hop connectivity to the cloud from remote sites so that customers can optimize their global business operations smoothly. The partnership will also enable companies – regardless of their location – to accelerate their digitalization plans.
This partnership will mean that e& network services can be easily connected and extended via O3b mPOWER, which aims to deliver high-speed connectivity services from tens of megabits to multiple gigabits per second to one site.
The partners point out that one-hop connectivity to Azure Cloud and SES’s satellite network will enable simplicity and flexibility but also minimize any network latency delays.
The ground station at Ras Al Khaimah is one of eight initial O3b mPOWER gateway sites which will support both customer data services and the TTC (telemetry, tracking and control) control of the satellite system.
“SES’s O3b mPOWER satellite services will enhance cloud-enabled capability to meet critical industry connectivity needs with greater resiliency and enable users in e&’s customer base to benefit from enabling cloud applications regardless of where they are located," explains William Chappell, Vice President of Azure Global, Microsoft.
