Artist rendition of the SES O3b mPOWER constellation. Photo: SES

SES has signed an agreement with Pivotel to build a new satellite ground station at the Pivotel teleport in Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia. This ground station, announced Monday, will support SES’s O3b mPOWER Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) constellation, and will begin operations in the second half of 2021.

This ground station project is part of an ongoing partnership between SES and Pivotel, and aims to provide low-latency connectivity services across Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Pivotel has hosted an O3b gateway since 2013, when SES’s current Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation was launched.

Pivotel CEO Peter Bolger commented on the agreement: “We’re proud to partner with SES to deliver a new satellite ground station in Dubbo that offers an incredible number of new opportunities for regional and remote communications across the country and Pacific region. The extremely high cost of deploying fiber links to remote communities means satellite is often the only choice, but it has come at the cost of lower download speeds and higher latency. SES’s O3b mPOWER’s fiber-like performance largely overcomes those trade-offs, offering the potential of city-like connectivity to remote and isolated communities everywhere.”