November 2, 2022 – Digicel Pacific, the leading telecommunications provider in the Pacific region, is bolstering its coverage in Papua New Guinea, leveraging SES’s O3b medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellite system to provide its customers with seamless connectivity following damage to the international Pipe Pacific Cable (PPC) which typically connects Papua New Guinea to Australia and rest of the world. The additional O3b services will continue to help Digicel Pacific maintain connectivity during outages caused by such cable breaks while also expanding coverage across the remote parts of the country, a crucial enhancement for the 80% of Papua New Guineans residing in rural areas. The support from SES comes at a critical time for the South Pacific island after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in September caused damage to multiple cable systems, resulting in large disruption to data services across most of the country. During the disruption, SES assisted Digicel Pacific with emergency bandwidth, providing an increase of 40% in high-performance, low-latency O3b services deployed across 12 sites throughout the country to keep communities connected. SES also stepped in with an incremental 3 Gbps of capacity and additional ground equipment to enable Digicel Pacific to restore its network connectivity and critical communications services for both consumers and telecommunication customers.