Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC), a prominent telecom operator in the United Arab Emirates, and SES have successfully trialed satellite-enabled 5G backhaul in the Middle East through their utilization of SES’s Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites. This announcement from both of these firms marks an important advancement in telecommunications technology within this region.

The purpose of the live trial was to exhibit how SES’s existing O3b constellation could stretch 5G coverage to remote sites and bolster du’s corporate customers, including distant energy locations with highly trustworthy, extraordinary throughput, and ultra-fast network connectivity. The live trial ran a variety of experiments on an SES’s O3b satellite, like voice calls and data scenarios, in order to gauge the quality of delivered service as well as the pressure test load limit.

O3b’s low latency and high throughput 5G backhaul link demonstrated its perfect suitability for 5G satellite-enabled networks, delivering a Quality of Experience that is equal to terrestrial backhauling technologies.

With its extensive history of utilizing satellites for cellular backhaul and delivering data communications services to our corporate customers, du has made great strides. However, we need a more powerful solution that offers better throughputs and low latency performance in order to support our enterprise applications like cloud storage and big data analysis. O3b mPOWER will provide the dedicated multi-gigabit per connection capacity with optimized performances on par with traditional systems—allowing us to deliver unparalleled Quality of Experience (QoE) while preserving the overall flexibility offered by satellite solutions,” said Saleem AlBlooshi, Chief Technology Officer at du.

John-Paul Hemingway, SES’s Chief Strategy & Product Officer, expressed his gratitude for the chance to team up with du on this demonstration of high-performance MEO services. This also enabled them to deploy Middle East’s first satellite-enabled 5G backhaul network. With O3b mPOWER guaranteed SLA bandwidth and greater flexibility, du can rapidly create new sources of income by extending its 4G/5G quality telecom service into remote areas and cost effectively connecting their enterprise customers.

SES has kicked off the deployment of O3b mPOWER technology, resulting in high-performance services with remarkable throughput, predictable low latency, and extraordinary flexibility to fulfill incoming traffic. With 2023 for O3b mPOWER service, du and its customers can be sure of secure grade performance that works perfectly on cloud-based applications through either private or public internet connection.