We have gone to space!
Low Earth Orbit satellite connectivity. Anywhere. Even where there is nothing.
Every business has that one site..... the depot, the mine, the lodge, the store in the middle of nowhere, where the fibre is never going to arrive, the LTE backup has not worked since the day it was installed, and the point of sale falls over every time the weather turns.
You have probably been waiting for Starlink to solve it....
FirstNet decided not to wait.
First Technology Group, through FirstNet and in partnership with Q-KON, now delivers Low Earth Orbit satellite connectivity on the Eutelsat OneWeb constellation, plugged directly into the FirstNet core network.
This is not the VSAT you remember. Those geostationary satellites sit 36,000 km above your head, which is exactly why they were slow.
These new satellites sit at around 1,200 km. Low latency, high throughput, always on, handing your connection from one satellite to the next as they pass overhead.
And because we interconnect directly rather than reselling somebody else's package, we build the packages ourselves:
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Primary business connectivity. Uncapped, no fair usage policy, up to 100 Mbps.
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Cost effective backup. Priced on a data bundle or on throughput, and considerably cheaper than the LTE APN you are paying for now.
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Pooled bandwidth. As many sites as you like, sharing one allocation between all of them.
Where this changes things:
- Off grid sites with no fibre, no microwave and no cell signal. Mining, forestry, agriculture, lodges.
- Branch and store failover that actually fails over, point of sale included.
- Events, conferences and outside broadcast. Up in hours, gone a few days later.
- Vehicles and vessels in motion, using mobile terminals.
- Disaster recovery, for the day somebody puts a spade through your fibre route.
- Anywhere in Southern Africa, with Angola, the DRC and Zambia southwards on the network today.
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FirstNet handles all of it. Project management, logistics, certified installation teams, monitoring, support and SLA, with the capacity to deliver more than 250 new services a month.
And one more thing. If you are still waiting on hardware ordered months ago that now costs double what you budgeted (see TOP STORIES #180, #181 and #182), real connectivity to a remote site changes that conversation completely.
Ageing machines become endpoints into Windows 365 or a hosted environment in FirstNet's data centre, and the order you are still waiting for may not be needed at all.
So..... which of your sites is the one that always breaks?
Please contact your First Technology Group account manager to arrange a connectivity review with the FirstNet team, and find out exactly where Low Earth Orbit satellite connectivity fits into your network.
Fibre where you can. Satellite where you cannot. One network, one partner.
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