Intelsat Wins Contract with the African Virtual University to Provide Internet Bandwidth...

PEMBROKE, Bermuda -- Intelsat has been selected by the African Virtual University (AVU) as its strategic communications partner in an initiative to establish a higher education bandwidth consortium which will make Internet bandwidth more widely accessible to African universities. Using Intelsat's

The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA), a body consisting of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have pooled their resources to fund universities in Africa. By leveraging economies of scale to achieve cost efficiencies and satisfy demand for Internet bandwidth services, the PHEA funding is channeled through the AVU, which selected Intelsat to provide the needed bandwidth.

Intelsat's network for the service consists of its teleport in Germany and the IS-903 and IS-904 satellites, both of which provide strong coverage of the region. The AVU, an international university based in Nairobi, Kenya affiliated with 56 learning centers and institutions in 27 countries in Africa, will provide some of its own content and source additional educational content from universities in the U.S., Australia and Europe. The partnership between the AVU, PHEA and Intelsat is geared toward achieving the AVU vision and mission of increasing access to tertiary education across the continent.

The AVU was established in 1997 as a World Bank project to assist sub-Saharan African countries in enhancing capacity availability to African universities through technical and administrative support and channeling brokered content. The AVU recognizes that lack of connectivity is a serious drawback for most of its partner institutions, which hampers the delivery of Open Distance and e-Learning programs, as well as access to digital resources. The AVU was identified by the PHEA as the ideal institution to manage the complex project based on its proven skills in purchasing and managing satellite-based distance education across its own centers in Africa.