“The eight sites will provide telemetry, tracking and control capabilities to enable SES’s management of the constellation.” The company said on 29 April that they would be “operational in the second half of this year.”

One ground station will be based at the existing SES site in Hawaii, but the others will be run by or with partners.

The ground station located in Dubbo, about 400km northwest of Sydney, Australia, will be operated by Pivotel, a satellite phone operator. The facility in Thermopylae, Greece, will be operated by the Greek telecoms group OTE. Four sites, including one in Phoenix, Arizona, will be co-located and co-operated with a Microsoft Azure data centre. The other locations are near Perth, Australia, and in Chile, the UAE and Senegal, the company stated.

O3b (which stands for the ‘other three billion’ people who do not have broadband internet access) will be a fleet of medium Earth orbit satellites that will provide high speed data and voice services to mobile phone operators and internet service providers.

The first three O3b Mpower satellites are expected to launch “in the third quarter of this year, with the next three in the first quarter of 2022.” The company aims to switch on services “in the third quarter of 2022.” SES did not state when the next five satellites that are planned would be launched.

Betzdorf-based SES bought out O3b Networks, in which it was already an investor, in 2016.

SES has about 2,100 employees worldwide and posted nearly €1.9bn in gross revenue last year.