Very-small-aperture terminal

internet work there? It did not, historically.

Before 2024, the island ran on a VSAT link, geostationary satellite, 10 megabits per second for the entire territory.

And in the early 2000s, if you wanted internet access, it cost you over £5 a minute through a UK provider.

Five pounds a minute means you're not browsing.

And that's the correct engineering decision, which is why I'd push back hard on anyone who thinks Starlink means Tristan is now just like everywhere else.

The important part is what they didn't replace.

Voice traffic still runs over the old VSAT link.

So the island has two entirely independent routes to the outside world, and if one goes down, the other picks up the telephone.

Like Wale said about the license, they were going to get the license, it took three years.

For us, it was our VSAT license that was revoked.

The provisional VSAT license we had was revoked.

But we had to adapt and be flexible.

But beyond that, the next curve, the next curve, the next curve, earlier speakers had already said that.

Like not depend on outside providers.

Back in the old days it used to be, what was the Vsat company? Intelsat and those guys.

And now we don't need to use SICOM connection to Djibouti in order to talk from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa.

Yeah, that blows my mind that we used to

And he said, you know what, Kurt, another coincidence.

We need a tech, I'm an electronics engineer, to come help set up a VSAT, a satellite downlink there for the NGOs.

And so I volunteered and went out there in 2002.

So right after the Taliban had been kicked out, there were still rockets coming in.

I reached for a half-buried folder near Voss's bunk.

Her handwriting filled the margins of sensor printouts, cross-correlation positive, input lag on array 7, check VSAT, and a single, black slash, do not redial.

In Voss's personal drawer, tapes covered in washy tape, night sample, pod hit, first cycle, and beneath, her access badge bent near the lamination.

The quarters felt lived in, beds slightly unmade, hastily folded clothes, a crossword next to a cup of instant coffee still half drunk.

So what is the core, um, topic here is that Sigma supports the shift and the focus from trying to solve the connectivity from a pure bandwidth perspective to shifting to being able to manage it properly and to use connectivity to enable use cases that, um, have not been possible at all or maybe they have been prohibitively expensive in the past.

So for example, you'd see in the traditional setup, you'd see a primary, let's say a VSAT system backed up by an L-band, uh, rather low-speed backup.

And of course, we've seen with the, you know, introduction of LEO a couple of years ago, you know, the usual suspects, things have changed, and we see people adopting L- LEO, multi-LEO, uh, systems even.

Um, and as you add more bearers to your setup, it gets increasingly important to be able to properly manage it.

And, um, and the shift to multi-orbit, multi-band has already happened, right? So this is something, this is the starting point.

So coming from here, as I said, you know, there are the usual suspects.

You know, there are the Starlinks, there are the OneWebs that are readily available on the LEO side, and there is the classic traditional VSAT networks.

So what we already see and will continue to see in an, at an increased pace is the shift in generations.