RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The SES-17 satellite will be launched on Saturday (22) from a space base in Guyana to offer a better broadband connection, mainly to Brazil and other Latin American countries.
The equipment is the result of five years of work and will start operating in early 2022. Initially, an aviation company, anchor investor Luxembourgish SES S.A., will be the primary beneficiary of the new satellite.
According to Ruy Pinto, director of technology at SES, the differential of the new equipment allows the broadband signal to be directed to a specific region and even follow users’ movement.
“It is possible to make the signal follow the path of a plane that left Rio de Janeiro for Miami, USA,” Ruy exemplifies. The promise is that the connection during the flight will have the same performance as a network on the ground and can use all the functionalities of smartphones, tablets, and online computers.
Although the focus is on offering a connection for a specific service at this early stage, it is expected that the Brazilian population will also benefit from the SES-17’s day-to-day operation shortly.
Omar Trujillo, vice president of sales at SES, says that partnerships may bring broadband internet to public places around the country. He cites as possible opportunities to offer a better connection in public schools, expand projects that bring wi-fi to public squares, and get a signal to remote parts of the country where the current coverage does not reach.
The SES-17 is a massive piece of equipment. From one end to the other, it is 46 meters, the same height as the Statue of Liberty, located in New York, USA. With 12 solar panels, batteries, and all the necessary equipment to emit the signal, the structure weighs 6.5 tons, the same as six popular cars.
SES-17
SES-17 is a high throughput all-electric geostationary communications satellite currently under construction and testing for launch in October 2021. Owned and operated by SES S.A. and designed and manufactured by Thales Alenia Space, SES-17 will work in conjunction with SES’s other geostationary satellites and SES’s medium Earth orbit O3b and O3b mPOWER satellites to provide connectivity services across the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean region.
SES S.A. is a Luxembourgish satellite and terrestrial telecommunications network provider supplying video and data connectivity worldwide to broadcasters, content and internet service providers, mobile and fixed network operators, governments, and institutions.
SES is one of the world’s leading satellite owners and operators with over 70 satellites in two different orbits, geostationary orbit (GEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). These include the well-known European Astra TV satellites, the O3b data satellites, and others with AMC, Ciel, NSS, Quetzsat, YahSat, and SES.
Based in Betzdorf, Luxembourg, and founded in 1985 as Société Européenne des Satellites, the company was renamed SES Global in 2001 and had been “SES” since 2006. The company’s stock is listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange and Euronext Paris with ticker symbol SESG and is a component of the LuxX, CAC Next 20, and Euronext 100 stock market indexes.
With information from R7
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