Nigeria issues more sat-comm licences
September 9, 2020
By Chris Forrester
Nigeria’s Communications Commission (NCC), the regulatory body overseeing the country’s communications sector, has issued new licences and permits equal to 13 additional feeds from mostly existing satellite operators to provide satellite services within the country.
The extra permits go to Intelsat, Eutelsat, Avanti, Yahsat, SES (via NSS New Skies), Inmarsat and Iridium. OneWeb is also included despite it being in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Space in Africa is reporting that the updated official list of authorized space stations in Nigeria released on August 31st by NCC featured 68 licensees, indicating that regulatory body issued additional 13 permits to operators from the 55 landing permits disclosed in December 2019.
The updated list now includes American operator Iridium with permits for eight space stations. New licences include Eutelsat’s KONNECT service which was launched in January 2020 to provide satellite communications services to Africa and parts of Europe.
SES acquired five additional landing permits through its UK-based subsidiary NSS Licensee B.V, which became effective on August 10th for the O3B network.
In terms of the frequency bands of operation, the majority of the satellites are based on C-band and Ku-band frequency. Ka-band frequencies feature significantly with SES’s five newly licensed space stations on Ka-band.