OneWeb Partners With Airtel Africa to Provide Better Connectivity Services in Africa

OneWeb has announced that it has entered into a relationship with Airtel Africa.

Through this collaborative partnership, OneWeb will be able to reach government and enterprise clients throughout large swaths of the continent with its high-speed, low-latency LEO connection services.

The partnership will concentrate on providing enterprise and civil government customers with satellite communications services for a variety of use cases, such as connectivity in rural areas, agriculture, hospitals, hotels, schools, and the energy and mining sectors.

Additionally, OneWeb and Airtel Africa will offer crucial backhaul in underserved and unserved areas.

This announcement expands on OneWeb’s earlier efforts in Africa, which included the deployment of Satellite Network Portals (SNP) in Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Angola, and Mauritius. OneWeb is still on pace to activate its coverage solutions in Africa and elsewhere in the world in 2023 with only four more launches to go.

“At OneWeb, we believe that connection everywhere changes everything, so we are excited to be working with Airtel Africa to improve OneWeb’s connectivity solutions throughout the African continent,” said Ben Griffin, VP Mobility and AMEA at OneWeb.

Given our common commitment to excellence and resilience in communications services, this is a strategic fit, and the alliance marks another exciting milestone on our journey to enabling global connection. We look forward to providing high-quality service throughout Africa, especially in the most difficult to access areas.

“Internet penetration is expanding across Africa and systems are even more connected as the digital transformation is driving growth among enterprises,” said Luc Serviant, Group Enterprise Director, Airtel Business at Airtel Africa.

Through our relationship with OneWeb, we will provide low latency and highly resilient communication services to help SMEs, entrepreneurs, corporations, and governments conduct business throughout Africa. With the goal of achieving complete coverage across Airtel Africa’s footprint, which consists of 14 countries in East, Central, and West Africa, in 2023, OneWeb and Airtel Africa will launch a service trial in South Africa in September.