Distance Education Knows No Borders
In terms of where the satellite industry is heading in Africa, there are plenty of things to get excited about and plenty of urgent needs that warrant attention. Distance education and telemedicine are two areas of concern. Is satellite technology being used to the fullest extent possible today in Africa when it comes to these services?
"Clearly much needs to be done in this field. More than any other region in the world, Africa needs to harness the potential of satellites to better serve vital public services such as education and health care," says ITSO's Toumi. "These public service applications would be significantly enhanced through the use of broadband technology, as they are bandwidth consuming and request always-on connections."
The African Virtual University (AVU), which is backed by the World Bank, brings together 14 universities including the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in Rwanda, the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, to name a few.
AVU is proof that distance education continues to evolve in the region, and in many respects, AVU is a next generation version of the National Technological University in the United States. AVU is one of several Netsat Express Inc. customers in Africa. David Hershberg, CEO of Globecomm Systems Inc., the parent company of Netsat Express, is excited that AVU is among the first Netsat Express customers to be using the new SkyBorne content delivery platform.
"This represents the culmination of a three-year development project. AVU is obtaining a complete end-to-end solution as we will supply satellite-based services and infrastructure," says Hershberg. "AVU intends to use our SkyBorne platform to deliver engineering and scientific courses to universities throughout Africa."
The SkyBorne platform is a multicasting solution that employs both Reliable File Transfer (RFT) for hybrid VSAT networks and Statistical Rebroadcast RFT in any instances where receive-only networks are in place.
Data files are not only retransmitted multiple times by the SkyBorne content delivery system to ensure high-speed, reliable delivery, but inbound rebroadcasts are also scanned on site by the local SkyBorne receiver so that any missing bits or data are identified and then injected into the data file in question. An auto-negative acknowledgement cycle activates the on-demand rebroadcast server at the hub to rebroadcast only the specific information missed at any sites. The positive acknowledgement cycle ensures and reports all sites have received a complete package. This vastly reduces bandwidth use and cuts delivery costs, according to Netsat Express.
Satellites Saving Lives
Africa is benefiting from a number of long-term satellite-based programs that have been monitoring climactic conditions and shifts in Africa. The Famine Early Warning System (FEWS), for example--http://www.fews.net--which is overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has been operating since 1985. FEWS uses U.S. polar orbit meteorological satellites along with several other satellites such as SPOT, the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SEAWIFS) on the Sea Star spacecraft, and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra (EOS AM 1) spacecraft to identify drought and flood zones.
In addition, the trigger events for various tropical diseases such as Rift Valley fever, malaria and even Ebola are becoming better understood as the so-called emerging science of Remotely Sensed Epidemic Surveillance (RSEPIS) technology, which is heavily dependent upon satellite imagery, continues to evolve.
"We are making steady progress when it comes to both identifying possible trigger events and determining the correlations between biomedical and satellite data in general," says Compton Tucker, senior earth scientist and head of the Global Image Mapping and Modeling Studies group of the Biospheric Sciences Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Besides Tucker, other RSEPIS experts including his co-worker at Goddard, Kenyan Assaf Anyamba, see the development of this technology as offering great promise, both in Africa and elsewhere. "The leadership in the U.S. government is an important over-arching requirement to drive and sustain this important research. Monitoring climactic modulation of infectious diseases by remote sensing systems offers great potential benefit to the public," wrote another RSEPIS expert, Dr. James Wilson of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC, recently. "Collaborative efforts between the remote sensing, meteorological, medical and public health communities should be encouraged and maintained to enable realization of this benefit."
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