SES headquarters. Photo: SES

SES has completed a 5G backhaul demonstration in the Middle East, the company announced, Jan. 16. It has been working with and du from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC), a telecom operator in the United Arab Emirates. It has successfully demoed what it claims is the first satellite-enabled 5G backhaul in the Middle East utilising SES’s Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites.

The aim of the live demonstration was to demonstrate how SES’s current O3b constellation could extend 5G coverage to remote locations and support du’s enterprise customers including offshore energy sites with highly reliable, high throughput and low latency network connectivity.

The live proof of concept saw numerous tests conducted over an SES’s O3b satellite, including voice and data scenarios to measure quality of service performance and stress test load capacity. SES reported the low latency and high throughput 5G backhaul link showed O3b is an ideal solution for 5G satellite-enabled networks with quality of experience at par with terrestrial backhauling technologies.

“O3b mPOWER promises to provide the dedicated multi-gigabit per connection scale with cloud-optimized and low-latency performance to provide the required quality of experience with the flexibility of satellite,” Saleem AlBlooshi, du CTO, said in a statement.