In a company statement, O3b said the CDR validated that its satellite designs would exceed technical specifications. “The system will now serve terminals within a broader footprint of up to 700km diameter. The constellation will offer more than 70 Gbps of bandwidth on a global basis at round trip latencies below 130 milliseconds.”

   Satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space supervised the four-day CDR process and passed O3b by demonstrating completion of the design phase.

   O3b engineers reviewed the space system design to enable compliance against the required specifications. “By characterizing the RF performance and completing qualification testing of the satellite antenna subsystem, a significant aspect of the link performance of the O3b system could be validated,” the company said.