Avanti pushes for satellite adoption to fill in Africa’s gaps in coverage
At a time when artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and data analytics are attracting the most talent in technology, satellite operator Avanti is pushing to get more people into the space industry.
Interest in satellites has grown worldwide since Elon Musk launched Starlink a few years ago.
Avanti has four satellites, having invested $1.2bn (just under R23bn). Debbie Mavis, director at Avanti Communications said $800m of that capacity was over Africa.
Stories abound in the information communication technology sector of a skills shortage, which has seen many indemand people being poached by banks or deep-pocketed multinational technology companies. Much of this talent is based on STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Mavis said that the nontraditional routes into STEM industries, such as satellite, would help launch careers in space in Africa.
“We have growing offices in SA, Nigeria and Kenya and a further 250 field engineers installing. We work in conjunction with our local partners to provide on-the-ground training and technical expertise,” she told Business Day.
Like a number of infrastructure providers, the company has its own accreditation programme for technicians providing connectivity through its network. “We believe in hiring local people in the countries where we operate to meet the needs of our customers,” said Mavis.
The global space economy grew 8% to $546bn in 2022 and is projected to grow a further 41% in the next five years, according to the Space Foundation.
Mavis highlighted that the African space economy in 2021 was valued at $19.49bn and was projected to grow by 16.16% to $22.64bn by 2026. The industry employed more than 19,000 people across the continent.
The group has a number of business areas, one of which is to provide additional satellite coverage for other satellite providers in areas where they do not have network cover.
In the same vein, Avanti also works with mobile operators on the continent such as MTN, Vodacom and Airtel, plugging coverage gaps, particularly in less densely populated areas.
Despite notable improvements in the past decade, internet connectivity in rural areas and outside big centres remains limited, and building networking infrastructure in underserved areas is costly. Global telecom body, the GSMA, says the coverage gap in Sub-Saharan Africa narrowed from 50% in 2014 to 17% in 2022.
Avanti also serves military clients as a third area of business.
“We do a lot of work with the military around [Africa] for peace keeping, surveillance, border control. This can be in big areas or man packs that have satellite capability and can be carried around,” said Mavis.
The fourth is sector is education.
“We provide connectivity into schools where there is no other means for connectivity. We currently have a project with 245 schools in Kenya that have our satellite capacity to bring connectivity to them. We also have trials in the DRC, in Niger, Burundi and a number of other countries,” she said.
Like other geostationary satellite providers, including EutelSat, Avanti is working to capitalise on the opportunity in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
MTN recently revealed it was in talks with Musk’s Starlink, while Vodacom and parent Vodafone are now working with Amazon’s Project Kuiper. Starlink and Project Kuiper are making use of LEO satellites.
“It would be pretty naive to think geo will last forever. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Co would not be investing in an industry if there’s no future in it,” said Mavis.
Satellites operate at different levels above the Earth’s surface. LEO satellites like those of Starlink operate at an altitude of 2,000km or less. Geostationary satellites are at an altitude of more than 35,000km. Mediumorbit satellites operate at 2,000km-8,000km.
All this comes at a heavy cost. Launching a traditional highaltitude satellite is estimated to cost $500m. To launch a network of low-altitude satellites such as Starlink or OneWeb costs about $5bn.