Please be advised that there will be sun interference affecting the G-11 Satellite on which our VSAT services are now provisioned.

Dates: 31 March 2010 / 01 April 2010

Time: 11:48am

Duration: Between 5-15 minutes on each day (depending on geographical location)

white-space: pre;"> Service Restoration: Services should be restored automatically

Service Recovery: In the unlikely event your service does not recover, please contact the following support number: 021-702-4848

This outage is due to the sun being directly behind G-11 and the solar radiation swamping the signal from G-11 to the VSAT terminal.  Once the earth has rotated a short way so that the sun is no longer directly behind the satellite, service goes back to normal. 

For those who want to know a bit more about Sun Outages and the impact they have on the Indian stock exchange (seriously!), Wikipedia has a short entry here.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by the outage and thank you for your patience.

regards,

The Umoya VSAT team.

It is March once more.  Apart from it being more like February from the point of view of the weather, it is once more time for the Argus Cycle Tour.  Cyclists from all over the world (including some fella from Texas called Lance Armstrong) will be descending on Cape Town to chase each other around the Peninsula, just for the hell of it.  Takes all types to make a world.

It is also the 6th year running that Umoya will be there, q uietly making some of t he communications for the tour organisers work.

We will be configuring the VoIP phones (on an Asterisk server setup by Connection Telecom) for use as a call centre on the day for various parties.  We track the amount of incoming calls answered, dropped, unanswered etc. & what extensions attended the calls. We will also do voice recording of all calls for playback after the event.

We provide broadband internet access via WiFi and our Wide Area Network for the PC's in the Joint Operations Centre at Disaster Management's Tygerberg contact centre.

This year, the organisers have asked us to assist with connectivity to some of the timing mats along the route. This will provide Race Tec with VSAT & 3G connectivity to the their tracking server from places like Cape Point and Chapman's Peak where signals from GSM networks are not that strong. This will allow them to check when each cyclist passes that particular point.  Apparently some participants have been known to take the odd short cut in order to claim faster times - sies, that's just not cricket (or cycling)!

So if you're "doing the Argus" this weekend, all the best - may the wind be at your back and the road rise up to meet you in the nicest of ways.  Just one word of caution though - don't take any short cuts, will you? ;)

This past month has been very intense, but thanks to the dedication of the Umoya Team and our partners (working 7 days a week and up to 16hrs a day) we have managed to get 85% of the Gauteng schools back online and 100% of our critical sites in the Western Cape. We still have quite a few sites to migrate and these will be done during the course of the next two weeks. The G11 satellite has superior coverage compared with IS-4 and we are also experiencing higher quality signal strength, meaning that the satellite network should prove to be more stable and give better performance. In the process of doing this migration and with our newly established partnership with Vodacom Business, Umoya has been able to improve the overall design of our customers  networks by adding more redundancy and improved performance. This has enabled us to lay a strong foundation for future growth by being able to offer superior carrier class services. We would like to thank our customers for having patience with us whilst we have migrated their networks from the failed IS-4 satellite. This migration would have had to have happened sometime this year, so it least it is almost behind us. The launch of the New Dawn satellite is scheduled for December and should come into service during the first quarter of 2011. New Dawn will be in the same orbital slot as G11, so migrating from G11 to New Dawn will not require a re-point of the satellite dishes. New Dawn is being funded jointly between a South African consortium and Intelsat and will be operated by Intelsat on their behalf. It is good that South Africans can now say that they essentialy own a majority stake in a communications satellite. Umoya is proudly South African and is glad to be supporting this venture.

Satellite boost for African telecoms

11 December 2008

Bermuda-based international satellite service provider Intelsat is partnering with a South African investor group led by Convergence Partners to build and launch a new satellite that will be ideally positioned to serve the African continent.

The satellite, to be called Intelsat New Dawn, will feature a payload optimised to deliver wireless backhaul, broadband and television programming to the continent, and is expected to enter service in early 2011.

Africa has been one of the fastest growing regions for fixed satellite services in recent years, fuelled by demand for critical infrastructure from communications providers and television broadcasters.

Debt and equity funding

The project is expected to cost a total of about US$250-million (about R2.55-billion), and will be funded approximately 85% with debt and 15% with equity, with the largest participants in the debt funding consortium being South Africa's Nedbank Capital and the Industrial Development Corporation.

Intelsat will provide almost 75% of the equity funding, at approximately $25-million, while the remaining 25% will be provided by South African investment companies Convergence Partners and Altriah Telecoms.

Customers signed up

Over half of the satellite's capacity has already been reserved for several leading continental companies, including Vodacom International, Gateway Communications Africa, Zain Nigeria and Gilat Satcom.

Intelsat added that pre-orders for satellite capacity currently totalled more than $350-million, with some contracts for up to 15 years of service on the satellite.

"The New Dawn joint venture is a great example of the type of creative investments Intelsat will use to further develop our fleet in regions where we believe there is unmet demand," Intelsat CEO David McGlade said in a statement this week.

"Once in service, Intelsat New Dawn will be an integral part of our global, resilient satellite network, providing growth capacity and allowing us to further expand our services to our long-time customers in Africa."

Convergence Partners chairman Andile Ngcaba said the satellite would "provide world-class connectivity, allowing businesses to grow and rural communities to connect.

"Convergence Partners believes that investments in African projects of this nature can offer superior returns while also accelerating the socio-economic development of the continent."

SAinfo reporter

By this morning, Monday 22 February 2010, 70% of the Gauteng schools have been migrated to G11.  The sites we are now dealing with are those where civil engineering work is needed to reposition the dishes, and where technical or logistical challenges have thwarted us so far.  We still aim to have as close to 100% of the schools up by the end of February.

The migration of our Western Cape customers started over the weekend, after installation teams had been trained on the new equipment we are using.  These sites should also be migrated by the end of the month.

To date, we have been frustrated with logistical challenges, especially with timely supply of new equipment. As most of these issues had been ironed by this morning, we're optimistic that apart from sites which have specific technical challenges, the repointing  should proceed without further delays.

We have an interim progress report on service restoration:

We are in the final stages of concluding an agreement with a national network operator which will not only provide us with satellite bandwidth but will put us in a position to resell a suite of services which will supplement and enhance our VSAT offering.  Adversity often brings unexpected benefits (‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose’ - Romans 8:27-28).

Engineers have literally been working through the nights to set up a new network. The satellite hub is now up and connected to Intelsat satellite G11.  We have started repointing the antennae at the 250 sites for the schools in Gauteng.

We are working with solutions architects from the national network operator to develop a cost effective yet extremely robust WAN offering.  We will be in a position to start repointing VSAT dishes and installing the supplementary Customer Premises Equipment by Monday 15 February.  The teams will be starting with the 16 critical Disaster Recovery sites, starting on Thursday 11th February at Tygerberg moving on to the EMCs and WBs and more remote sites before the 16th.  The balance of the sites will be done before the end of Feb.  The schools will also be completed before the of Feb.

We would like to extend our thanks to our customers, many of whom, although anxious to see service restored as soon as possible, have been understanding and supportive during this extraordinary time.