O3b and Ozonio Bring Broadband Connectivity to Remote Amazonian City of Tefé over Innovative Satellite Network

The service is available for residential, corporate and government customers. The solution is being offered in Tefé in partnership with its regional distributor Ozonio, which also invested in the necessary infrastructure to enable a new model for quickly delivering the service where it is needed.

The O3b solution has been active in the city of Tefé since early June and has been welcomed by the local market. On Wednesday (29/06), at an event at the University of Amazonas, in Tefé, O3b will officially launch and present its technology to companies, government and local service providers. The O3b model proposed is based on the “pay as you grow” concept, allowing the operator or ISP to purchase the amount of megabits per second needed, then increasing that capacity over time as needed, paying a monthly fee. The O3b solution can scale to hundreds or even thousands of Mbps, always with a low response time (low latency).

"Our technology provides the same high quality connectivity for a remote region as a large urban center would have,” said Sandro Barros, General Manager of O3b Networks in Brazil. “We want to bring to Tefé citizens, as well as many other similarly under-connected cities in Brazil, the ability to access the same type of connection found in Rio or São Paulo. Any city that has difficulty being connected with fiber is a potential market for O3b."

"O3b will generate a lot of development for the region and true digital inclusion,” said Adriano Vieira Vargas, Commercial Director of Ozonio. “This is truly ‘Fiber in the Sky’ for the city of Tefé.”

By 2018, O3b Networks will add another eight satellites to the 12 which comprise the company’s constellation today. In addition to Tefé, other remote Brazilian cities with significant population density, but with poor internet connectivity and mobile service no better than 2G, will also be targeted by O3b for the high-performance service.

Because O3b satellites are located only 8,000km from Earth, far closer than traditional geostationary satellites which are 36,000km from Earth, they are more suitable for voice and internet services because the latency (response time) is substantially lower. The O3b constellation is designed to provide high capacity internet for terrestrial providers and high demand points such as oil platforms, mobile operator towers, and even cruise ships such as Royal Caribbean.

O3b has its primary Brazilian office in Rio de Janeiro, and also operates its own teleport in Hortolândia, Brazil, providing more security and speed, as well as more efficient handling of Brazilian traffic.