Our first ever Middle East and Africa dedicated edition is out. In this issue we explore a common theme throughout the region for satellite: high demand and opportunity for growth. We talk to executives looking to Africa as the next big growth market for satellite, but wondering if the region is ready to take the next steps in its satellite use. We also look into the end users demands for satellite, as the DTH market expands in the Middle East.

As a preview of Via Satellite’s Middle East & Africa edition, we bring you the 10 best quotes from this issue:

It is anticipated that the broadcast market will continue to grow, eventually reaching a critical mass of video households and channels. Once this happens, there will be a tremendous potential for the video broadcast and pay-TV markets to have similar types of significant growth and success that you see today in most of the developed markets of Europe, Asia and the Americas. It will be very well suited for satellite application and encouraging for satellite service providers. – Felix Damiba, managing director of Africa, Asia Broadcast Satellite.

We believe that satellite will continue to play a major role as we serve our customers. Satellite is also key when it comes to building redundancy into the network, as a gap fill for terrestrial services and as additional routing for traffic engineering. – Deon Liebenberg, managing executive for large enterprise and international business, Vodacom

Satellite has allowed mobile operators to deploy and expand mobile services with high flexibly in the African continent. With the gradual expansion of the terrestrial backhaul, the satellite terminals have been moving continuously to cover new areas. This led to a decrease in satellite demand for domestic backhaul in the last three years. This trend may change with the increase of demand for data services and the explosion of low-cost mobile devices. … Satellite operators should innovate to offer much higher bandwidth capacity at lower cost that will compel the mobile and fix operators to increasingly rely on satellite. – Kamal Fayed, general manager of global carrier services, MTN

I do see a reliance on satellite band- width when talking about remote location exploration. A lot of the locations that Tullow develops for exploration activities are very, very remote with very little fiber technology present in those locations. There will be an increase in the amount of satellite bandwidth we use locally to support these operations. – Ian Theophilus, global infrastructure manager, Tullow Oil

The business model around satellite broadband, even though there have been massive improvements, is just not there where you can offer a high quality service to customers that they can afford. We have been looking closely at what is happening in the United States, but it is very niche. That niche in our markets is very small, it is not something we are particularly interested in doing. – Gerdus van Eeden, CTO, MultiChoice Africa

Demand for satellite capacity will grow in line with the growth of demand for availability of basic services everywhere. This is expected to continue in the coming five years until broadband comes into the picture as a requirement everywhere. At that stage, satellite technology will have to offer alternative technologies to be competitive in both cost and quality. – Wolfgang Wemhoff, CTO, Nawras

There is a bit of a squeeze on capacity there at the moment. So, that is having some impact on our desired rollout of HD channels. As soon as there is transponder capacity available, we will look to launch additional services. We operate today 10 transponders on 7 degrees west … split between Nilesat 102 and Nilesat 201, and Eutelsat 7 West A. – Mark Billinge, CTO, OSN

Our demands for capacity will depend on the popularity of the satellite platform. More than likely, satellite platforms at 7 degrees west and 26 degrees east will continue to grow and the demand for capacity on these systems will remain robust. Newly launched systems on other orbital positions may face an uphill battle in market penetration. – Ahmed AlMuhaideb, vice president, broadcasting & IPTV services, du

The evolution of HTS with competitively priced CPE will have a significant impact on the Middle East market but is subject to regulatory hurdles that are yet to be reduced. We see high demand for broadband services as well as SNG services but, as you are aware, the Middle East is a highly regulated market and as such, right solutions are to be crafted. – Hisham Ansari, CCO, HorizonSat

Current HTS satellites support Ka-band and Ku-band is still under testing, Rotana might consider the same for distribution means but not in the short future; however, it will all depend on MENA market delivery reediness. We are looking into using HTS as part of our business propositions to the marketplace. – Naser Refaat, technical director, Rotana

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