The joint-venture between Reliance Jio and SES expects to start its satellite-delivered broadband service before the end of this year.“We have been ready with our ground infrastructure and everything else for the last two years,” said Harsh Verma, SES’s vice president of sales for the Asia-Pacific region, during a press briefing on July 24th. “We are already doing proof of concept demos, but commercial traffic is not yet permitted. In my opinion, we are just a few months away; it should happen within this year.”“By the end of 2026, we will have three additional satellites in orbit, enabling us to deliver three times the capacity we provide today with Reliance Jio,” continued Verma. “That would mean more throughput and would mean that we will scale the gateway infrastructure from what we have today to multiple sites in the future.”Key to the efficiency of the service is the SES fleet of O3b mPOWER satellites.“For backhauling services, which is the core of their network and infrastructure planning and deployment, they [Jio] are looking to use mPOWER for that. And they are also using geostationary assets, SES-12,” Verma added.Indeed, the broadband-by-satellite market is heating up in India, with Starlink, Bharti Airtel OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper all very active in seeking to secure final transmission approvals from India’s regulators.
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