After nine years of R&D and testing, Google’s sister firm Loon this week announced that a fleet of balloons is now providing broadband services in Kenya. According to this post by Alastair Westgarth, Loon’s CEO, “this is a first in many ways: the first non-emergency use of Loon to provide connectivity on a large-scale basis, the first application of balloon-powered internet in Africa, and the first of what will be many commercial deployments around the world”.

The Internet of Food & Farm 2020 project is important. So much so that the European Commission has contributed EUR 30 million. 

Telecom26 can provide connectivity across the whole of Africa and our team is working on some very interesting and innovative projects there. This week we’ll take a look at what’s happening on the ground in Zimbabwe.

Earlier in the month, we discussed two African whys:

• why 5G won’t be coming to Africa any time soon and

• why many of our customers on the ground in rural Africa are more interested in our 2G and IoT capabilities than discussing distant future migration to 4 or even 5G.

However, as an innovative and fast-growing global operator, of course we are preparing our portfolio to meet demand for 5G from a variety of sectors.

Connecting Africa, our must-read news site about the African telecoms market, last week wrote a piece about how mobile data prices in Nigeria have dropped by 75% over the past five years. This is according to data from Research ICT Africa, a policy and regulation think-tank, which showed that the average price of 1GB of data in Nigeria has dropped from $11.15 in mid-2014 to $2.78 at the end of 2019.

Vessels of all sizes generate increasing data volumes, from IoT devices, on-board processes and applications, as well as personal communications devices. Managing this flow is increasingly complex – and can be costly if satellite is the only option. But not all data is time-critical. Telecom26 provides an advanced router that enables data transfer to be optimised, enabling access to terrestrial networks when in range and satellite while at sea. It controls data transmission and chooses the optimum path, based on application.