SES to provide SD-WAN by satellite to South Sudan capital

European satellite company SES is to provide a business networking service to a local provider, RCS Communication.

The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) will be built on SES Networks’ own SD-WAN service that will enable RCS to deliver an improved experience to customers, mainly non-governmental organisations (NGOs), embassies and businesses in Juba (pictured), the capital of South Sudan.

Flippie Odendal, managing director of RCS, said: “SES Networks’ SD-WAN service has met RCS’s requirements and direction of moving towards intelligent, software-defined services that will enable us to dynamically react to evolving market conditions and scale whenever needed.”

SES Networks said its SD-WAN service allows customers to use WAN access connections ranging from SES’s geostationary satellites and its medium Earth orbit (MEO) constellation, as well as fibre and other terrestrial links.

With the recent availability of fibre networks in South Sudan, RCS began seeking services that would enable them to bring resiliency and intelligence to the edge and pass end-to-end traffic securely over different available WAN links based on application-aware steering.

John-Paul Hemingway, CEO of SES Networks, said: “We developed our SD-WAN service to bring to our customers intelligent, application-aware resiliency, efficiency, visibility and control.”

RCS Communication has been using SES’s services since 2014. In 2018 it also said it had established the first site for rival company Avanti’s Hylas 4 high-speed satellite broadband service in South Sudan. It reported speeds of up to 35Mbps down and 4Mbps up.