Q-KON Launches Africa’s First Eutelsat OneWeb LEO Satellite Service for Digital Bank

Q-KON has announced that further to their 2023 incorporation of Eutelsat OneWeb LEO satellite connectivity into their Twoobii Smart Satellite Services, the first bank branch of a leading digital bank has now gone live on the service, and both bank staff and customers are already reaping the benefits of always-on connectivity.

Not only is this a first for the leading South African digital bank in question, but it is also the first operational Eutelsat OneWeb LEO site in Africa. As such, it represents a major milestone for satellite connectivity on the African continent. Africa’s unique connectivity and infrastructure challenges often defy off-the-shelf solutions; rather, they require a more bespoke approach of the sort exemplified by Q-KON’s Twoobii Smart Satellite Service, and Eutelsat OneWeb.

The solution in question combines anytime, anywhere connectivity with the necessary security protocols required for the transmission of bank account and financial transaction data in real time. Such is Q-KON’s confidence in this ground-breaking LEO technology that the first installation has been set up in a flagship branch with a high footfall of new and existing customers, both personal and business.

The Eutelsat OneWeb/Twoobii installation was designed from the very beginning as a fully operational site; it is not in any way a proof-of-concept model. It 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 Wi-Fi and ATM services.

The digital bank in question – one of the leading providers of banking services in Africa – is reportedly delighted with the results, and actively considering rolling out the Eutelsat OneWeb LEO system to many more branches. 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 naturally been achieved, and customers at this flagship bank branch can now 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. 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.

Dawie de Wet, Group CEO, Q-KON