George Adeka had been in the middle of one of his surveys in Marigat, Baringo County, when his day took an unexpected turn.

Close to where he and his team had been working, a pregnant woman went into labour, and without mobile connectivity, she could not call for an ambulance or any emergency services.

“I had to carry the pregnant woman to the hospital,” he says.

While he knew that the low connectivity in sparsely populated areas is a challenge, this incident brought it home. Without connectivity, making a simple phone call in parts of Northern Kenya in times of distress is a challenge, and even if you manage to, you would have to drive hundreds of kilometres to get help.

This is just one example from George’s many travels as the Senior Manager of Radio Network Implementation and Operations at Safaricom PLC. For the past 15 years, he has been working to increase network connectivity across the country and has seen the impact of low or non-existent network coverage in hard-to-reach areas, especially in Northern Kenya.

Mobile connectivity in these parts is sparse, meaning communities miss out on basic and significant aspects of life like communication, healthcare, education, work, social inclusion, and even entertainment.

The poor road network and the lack of a connection to the national grid has made it extremely difficult and expensive to put up base stations to facilitate wireless communication, leaving many communities in digital darkness.

“As a company, for quite a number of years, we’ve been putting money as Safaricom in improving the network in remote areas,” George says.

While the company spends billions on capital expenditure every year to expand and upgrade the network, the diurnal problems they face in terms of access mean that it’s expensive to serve them.

“The cost of building is usually twice or sometimes even three times that of building an ordinary site because we have to do everything for ourselves: build the road, carry sand and water for over 100 or 200 kilometres…,” George says.

When Safaricom expands coverage in these places, people with emergencies can call an ambulance without having to go very far to make the call. And when it comes to education, schools can undertake the admission process through websites rather than having a headmaster travel long distances to do it in person. Base transmission stations, like the one in Ngurunit and another in Olgulului, bring about a world of a difference, with towns springing up around them as they create opportunities for business.

Still, deploying these sites presents challenges like theft and vandalism and because they are not close to major towns, access can be difficult, even when the sites are monitored around the clock remotely and the engineers who do so don’t switch off.

To counter these challenges, Safaricom has developed a new innovative solution called Satellite Mobile to extend the reach of its network to unserved and underserved areas.

In an era where digital connectivity is paramount, Safaricom and American company AST SpaceMobile have collaborated to provide satellite services to communities where cell service and high-speed internet don’t exist. AST SpaceMobile’s ambition is to build the first and only space-based cellular broadband network.

To do this, Satellite Mobile is a service that uses LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites which orbit the Earth at a lower altitude compared to geostationary (traditional) satellites.

To put it into perspective, the LEO satellite installed by AST orbits the Earth at an altitude of 500 kilometres, while other geostationary satellites reach an altitude of 36,000 kilometres.

This means that the LEO satellite, which is closer to Earth, will allow faster data transfer, especially in targeted parts of Mandera, Turkana, and Marsabit counties without coverage.

To ensure the satellite services work, Safaricom has built a ground station in Thika to provide a link between the LEO satellite and potential users once Satellite Mobile becomes operational.

“When a customer wants to communicate, the ground station will send a signal to the satellite, which will receive it and then send it back down. This can be done anywhere, particularly in areas without coverage, such as Tsavo East, Tsavo West, North Horr, Turkana, Kakuma, and others,” George says.

However, there’s a downside to this solution. Because the LEO satellite is closer to Earth, it rotates very quickly to stay above a single location and is only visible from the ground for a short time during each orbit. For Kenya, the LEO satellite orbits twice and comes into view for only 15 minutes each time. To make up for the time it isn’t in our view, about 40 more satellites are needed to sustain continuous coverage of specific areas in Kenya.

“This solution is meant to give everyone access. If you look at Safaricom, in terms of population coverage, we are at around 98%. That is where people are populated. But in terms of geographical coverage, on average, we sit at around 66 to 70%. So, there is a whole 30% of physical landmass that doesn’t have coverage,” says George.

The lack of network coverage affects places like Mt Kenya, a tourist destination that draws hikers and mountain climbers from around the world, and things get dire when someone has to be brought down from the mountain.

“There’s no coverage the higher up in the mountain you go, so guys have to come all the way down with a sick person,” says George.

The target is to increase the number of satellites from one to five in the coming months and to 40 in three years’ time, when the full Satellite Mobile service will be launched.

The service will be carried on 4G mobile broadband.

“The solution is very effective, and it’s comparable to the terrestrial service that we have. The only challenge we may face is the issue of capacity. In a situation where we’ll have a lot of people clustered in remote areas, making the demand higher, then we will have to complement that with a ground station, which, when you look at it critically, is a very progressive way of rolling out to our sites,” says George.

George and his team were scheduled to test out the LEO satellite during the second week of May 2024 to see how efficient the satellite is and how it can coordinate and hand over to terrestrial sites or coverage on the ground.

With such an innovative technological solution, the government, through the Communication Authority, has backed the trial phase of the Satellite Mobile project.

CA has supported this venture, from the importation and type approval of equipment to giving Safaricom a temporary license to operate the satellite technology. “They’re constantly keeping tabs on how it’s going. And that tells you how the government and the regulator are very supportive of new technologies,” says George.

If the LEO satellite is successful, it will have succeeded where other ventures, such as Google Loon, the subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. that aimed to provide internet access to rural and remote areas using high-altitude balloons in the stratosphere, failed. Despite bringing hope when they were trialled in Kenya in 2020, Google Loon was shut down in March 2021 due to its lack of profitability.