Discover Satellite

Eutelsat is a high-speed always-on Internet access service delivered via Satellite by Vox Telecom.

The service is ideal for any consumer, business, or enterprise requiring an affordable high-speed always-on internet access service – especially where other alternatives:

• Are not available.
• Are too expensive.
• Are unreliable.
• Are too slow.
• Have long installation lead-times.

Eutelsat gets you online instantly to surf the web, watch videos, download mail, etc. Eutelsat is available on a range of service plans with speeds up to 20Mbps.

The service does not depend on terrestrial cabling. This means no long lead times waiting for cables to be installed or for stolen cables to be replaced.

It also does not rely on 3G/LTE coverage.

Eutelsat is available nearly throughout South Africa, even in remote areas far from cities or towns.

VSAT terminals are installed at customers’ sites by authorised installers. Each terminal consists of a small dish installed outside at a carefully selected position to ensure it has a ‘clean’ path between the dish and the satellite. The dish connects via coaxial cable to the satellite modem installed indoors, delivering internet access via its Ethernet port(s).

The satellite ‘relays’ signals in the Ka frequency band, between the VSAT terminal and an earth-station in Luxembourg, ‘connecting’ the VSAT terminal to the internet.

The service is available throughout South Africa, except for small areas in the Northern Cape and North West Province. Coverage is delivered via 6 high-power spot-beams, each focused on a specific part of the country, overlapping in some areas.

The further a customer is located away from the centre of the spot-beam (where signals are the strongest), the weaker the signals become. For sites towards the edges of the beams, we compensate for the ‘weaker’ signal by using a larger dish.

The dish sizes being deployed for this service are: 74cm (oval) and 98cm (round)

There are numerous packages that can be selected. The advertised speeds are maximum ‘burstable’ throughputs.

Eutelsat’s network capacity planning aims to ensure that during the busiest hours of usage, the throughput over the satellite path does not drop below 50% of the link’s maximum speed.

Latency refers to the amount of time it takes a packet of data to travel across a network. With satellite service, that data must travel to the satellite (about 72,000 km), terminate in Luxembourg, break out to the Internet and on to its destination. This round trip adds about a 600ms delay to the total time your computer takes to communicate with an international Website or host server. The latency to a South African service is almost 800ms (round trip)