Recently the research team at Cable.co.uk reviewed the price of 1G of mobile data in 230 countries. The research found that one gigabyte (GB) of data cost $0.26 (£0.20) in India but $6.66 in the UK.

The global average was $8,53 for 1GB with the cheapest mobile data in Western Europe in Finland with an average of $1,16. The US had one of the most expensive rates - with an average cost of $12.37 for the same amount of data. The most expensive rate is Zimbabwe at $75,20 per GB. However, Africa also hosts countries with the cheapest rates with Rwanda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo offering rates below $1/GB.

If Twoobii was a country

Twoobii is a satellite business broadband service developed by Q-KON for Southern Africa and hosted on the IntelsatOne Flex global platform using the iDirect Velocity technology architecture.

Services such as Twoobii is introducing a new generation of satellite access options to the market and form the edge for bringing the benefits of recent satellite industry innovations and developments to the market and business end-users.

If Twoobii was a country, it would rank #75 globally and #15 in bub-Saharan Africa as per the Cable.co.uk survey, at $3,50/GB. The service offers additional advantages such as "uncapped" or fixed-fee service profiles, while data rates of up to 10Mbps can be provided.

This demonstrates that the global investments by companies such as Intelsat and iDirect, on which Twoobii is based, have created a completely new paradigm for satellite access services and are introducing a different business case to the commercial access service provider sector.

Not just price advantages

One of the most feasible business access applications of 3G services is as fail-over or redundancy for fixed line services to the retail market, or as a primary service for applications such as financial point-of-sale services. Currently, most network architects will consider 3G as their only option for back-up applications and would implement equipment with dual SIMs etc. in and effort to mitigate 3G service disruptions.

In fact, satellite offers various advantages for these applications, and it is now price competitive as well. These benefits include a fixed-fee service option (uncapped), high reliability with no dependability on local infrastructure, no risk of "bill-shock" for unexpected services or failover incidents, and seamless integration to the corporate data network core.

Business and network architects can integrate, manage and commercialise satellite business access services such as Twoobii much more easily than working with the mobile operators for 3G services. For example, Twoobii services are supported by a committed on-site services support SLA and network design philosophies that more readily support corporate data networks.

Business satellite - A new alternative

High services availability, focussed network management teams with committed field support SLAs, structured service profiles, and now attractive data rates are all adding up to position satellite business broadband services as the new alternative for business network access.