March 9, 2018 – SES announced that its four new O3b Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites were successfully launched into space by Arianespace onboard a Soyuz rocket, from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. The new Ka-band satellites will join SES’s existing constellation of 12 MEO satellites, orbiting at approximately 8,000 km from Earth – four times closer to the planet than geostationary (GEO) satellites, delivering connectivity with a low latency, fibre-like performance. Built by Thales Alenia Space, the four new O3b satellites will enable SES to bring more capacity, enhanced coverage and increased performance to market. By augmenting its O3b fleet, SES is scaling its unique ability to connect people, businesses, and continents with high performance communications anywhere on Earth. The O3b constellation is expanding to continue to drive digital equality and to support digital transformation across the globe. The additional capacity will enable SES Networks to cater to the growing consumption of bandwidth in the telecom, cloud, maritime, energy, and government markets. In addition to these four new satellites, another four O3b satellites are scheduled to launch in H1 2019. The first 12 O3b satellites were launched by three Soyuz launch vehicles in 2013 and 2014.