Telesat’s Telstar 12 Vantage satellite with antennas deployed. Photo: Telesat/Airbus Defence and Space

Pan-African telecoms group Liquid Telecom has entered into an arrangement with Telesat and VT iDirect to deliver enhanced services to enterprise customers in central and southern Africa. Liquid Telecom will leverage the iDirect platform to distribute cost-effective satellite services, using Telesat capacity on the Telstar 12 Vantage satellite, as part of a multi-year agreement. Liquid Telecom will also deploy iDirect’s Universal Satellite Hub at its teleport in Johannesburg, South Africa, along with the next-generation iQ Desktop remotes to offer Layer 2 Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) connectivity across both fiber and satellite on a single network for the first time.

According to Liquid Telecom, the new offering provides an end-to-end solution for Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) integrators and corporate customers that will deliver more reliable, consistent and cost-effective broadband for users across any network. It also will be available as a managed service offering, enabling enterprise customers access to a range of scalable and secure cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite and Windows 10.

“Our DVB-S2X product suite allows Liquid Telecom to leverage the benefits of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) capacity to significantly increase network efficiency, performance, and scale based on a significantly lower cost model,” said David Harrower, senior vice president of global sales at VT iDirect. “We are seeing a strong interest in satellite broadband across the enterprise market in Africa.”