O3b launches four satellites to cover emerging markets

O3b successfully launched early Wednesday the first four satellites for the project in which it aims to provide fast and cheap broadband to billions of people in underserved areas. After a delay due to weather on Monday the Arianespace Soyuz ST-B rocket successfully launched from French Guiana. An additional four are scheduled to be launched in September prior to the system becoming operational in November. First contact has been made with O3b's gateway in Hawaii. "In only a few years, we have designed and launched a revolutionary system; one that will transform the way communications are handled in many of the world's underserved markets," O3b's chairman John W Dick said. Customers witnessing the launch included Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, O3b's first Maritime customer, Telecom Cook Islands, who will receive the first commercial signals across the network this summer, and Maju Nusa, soon to roll out a 3G backhaul network in Malaysia built on O3b's low latency capacity. The company believes it can provide cheap voice and data connectivity to operators by using a novel approach, with spacecraft flying in the medium-earth orbit (MEO) at 8,000km, a quarter of the distance from the earth than is the case of geostationary satellites. The satellites will operate in the high-frequency Ka-band.