Nano-Satellites Key to Company 'SAS' Mobile Phone services: Text, Voice and Data In Latin America and Africa.

The low-cost mini satellites bringing mobile to the world

Large chunks of the planet are still of out of reach of mobile phone signals - billions are still without access to digital communications. But this could change thanks to shrinking satellite sizes and costs.

From article, (Lower-cost, space-based mobile phone services will soon be a reality thanks to one firm's fleet of nano-satellites that will bounce your voice or text signal from one spacecraft to the next and finally down to the person you're calling.
"People were thinking of using nano-satellites for Earth imagery but nobody had thought of using them for voice or text communications," says Israeli former fighter pilot Meir Moalem, the chief executive of Sky and Space Global (SAS).
"We were the first."

• The new space race

His firm is aiming to offer customers mobile phone connections via a constellation of 200 shoebox-sized satellites weighing just 10kg (22lb) each.

The fleet is set to be operational by 2020 and will provide text, voice and data transfer services to the Earth's equatorial regions - including much of Latin America and Africa - to a market of up to three billion people.

nano-satellites are a game-changer.

"Some customers invest several hundreds of dollars in the hardware for a satellite phone terminal and will pay $50 a month for the service. But if you can offer a solution for half of that - then the price can be compared to conventional mobile phones," he explains.
SAS says it is going for the gap in the market between existing satellite communications operators, such as Iridium, Inmarsat and Globalstar, and land-based mobile networks such as Vodafone, Telefonica, Airtel and Safaricom.
It is targeting customers earning less than $8 a day.

In Ghana, the company has just signed a five-year deal with telecoms provider Universal Cyberlinks to help government agricultural projects and public services, including monitoring cocoa production across 5,000 buying centres and checkpoints.
"When you travel outside of a city in Africa, often you lose your phone signal because it is not cost-effective to put up phone masts everywhere. That's where we come in," says Mr Moalem.
"In the West, we tend to forget that in many parts of the world people are not concerned about high-speed internet, they want to make simple phone calls, texting or money transfers. It's a basic need."
Africa is certainly becoming a key market for mobile services. There were 420 million mobile subscribers in 2016 and by 2020 there will be more than 500 million, around half the population, says industry body GSMA.)

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