Telecom Lead Europe: SES Broadband Services will offer satellite broadband services for the parliamentary elections in Burkina Faso set to take place on December 2, 2012.

Satellite technology ensures connectivity for the remote sites in Burkina Faso and has the advantage of quick deployment and immediate coverage and availability. The deployed infrastructure can also be available after the electoral process to provide Internet access to schools, public offices and remote villages.

As part of the agreement with the Independent National Elections Committee (CENI) in Burkina Faso, SES Broadband Services and its partners Newtec, Access Sat and Unicom will provide satellite equipment and bandwidth to enable connectivity between the 45 electoral district offices, which serve as the hubs for 14,698 polling stations across the country, and the central election office in the capital, Ouagadougou. The system will be used for video conferencing, surveillance, Internet access and fast and secure communication of ballots.

SES Broadband Services will use satellite capacity on an SES satellite located at 5 degrees East and hardware and hub-infrastructure provided by Newtec. Installations of the VSAT terminals are carried out by Access Sat and the video and the LAN network equipment is supplied by Unicom, according to Patrick Biewer, managing director, SES Broadband Services.

“The selected SES technology will facilitate a transparent electoral process, providing rapid and highly reliable data transfers. A series of innovations will also be introduced, including the use of biometrics for the voter registration. The selected satellite VSAT platform gives the advantage of quick deployment for fast transmission of electoral data from remote locations,” said Barthelemy Kéré, president of the CENI.

Advantages of satellite technology include rapid, secure data collection, aggregation, transfer and verification; a stable, sustainable communication system between all the sites resulting in the improved security of the electoral process, plus the legacy of a top-tier communication system which can be re-used or redeployed.

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