This represents a major milestone for satellite connectivity on the African continent as it’s not only a first for the bank but also the first operational LEO site in Africa.
Africa’s connectivity and infrastructure challenges often defy off-the-shelf solutions, required a bespoke approach like Q-Kon’s Twoobii Smart Satellite Service, and Eutelsat OneWeb.
The solution combines anytime, anywhere connectivity with the necessary security protocols required for the transmission of bank account and financial transaction data in realtime.
The first installation has been set up in a flagship branch with a high footfall of new and existing customers, both personal and business, underscoring Q-Kon’s confidences in the system’s security.
The Eutelsat OneWeb/Twoobii installation was designed from the beginning as a fully operational site and is being used to deliver a wide variety of complementary processes, both operational (internal) and customer-facing (external). These include intranet, software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs), branch online management, data backhauls, staff and customer WiFi and ATM services.
This Twoobii LEO service will be able to provide low latency, connectivity of 50Mbps, and will be a seamless redundancy service option for fibre circuits.
Full ICASA licencing has been attained, and banking customers can continue banking even in the event of terrestrial hardware failures or power outages. This results in a more seamless and streamlined banking experience, as the main causes of infrastructure-related failed or delayed transactions have now been effectively eliminated.
“This fully operational LEO installation is further evidence of the utility of the Q-KON Twoobii Eutelsat OneWeb solution in financial services contexts,” comments Dawie de Wet, group CEO of Q-KON. “We look forward to continuing the roll-out of this LEO connectivity solution to more bank branches to benefit the customers of our leading digital banking client.”
Featured picture: QKon technician Justin Koekemoer setting up the Eutelsat OneWeb LEO satellite.
