Gabon’s internet usage reaches about 72% of the population in January 2025, with roughly 1.84 million internet users out of a ~2.57 million population. Over 91% of Gabon’s population is urban, yet about 1,253 villages lacked any mobile coverage as of early 2024, with 200 additional villages planned for Phase 2 in 2024. Moov Africa…
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As of January 2025, about 11.3 million Senegalese use the internet, representing 60.6% of the population, with roughly 4 in 10 still offline. There were 22.7 million active mobile connections in early 2025, about 121% of the population due to multiple SIM cards. Approximately 90% of Senegal’s mobile connections are on 3G/4G/5G networks, i.e., broadband…
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Starlink’s residential service delivers about 100–250 Mbps down and 10–20 Mbps up, with latency around 20–50 ms and a median near 45 ms as of mid‑2025. Starlink pricing is typically around $120 per month for standard residential service, with a $80 Lite tier in some regions, and it offers month‑to‑month service with a 30‑day trial.…
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Biomass was selected in May 2013 as ESA’s seventh Earth Explorer mission to quantify forest carbon from space. The mission uses a P-band synthetic aperture radar at ~435 MHz (about 70 cm wavelength) with a 12-meter mesh reflector deployed in orbit to penetrate canopies and sense trunks. It employs fully polarimetric SAR (HH, HV, VH,…
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Space-based ADS-B became operational in 2019 with Aireon using Iridium NEXT’s 66 low Earth orbit satellites at about 780 km, each carrying an ADS-B receiver listening at 1090 MHz and delivering data to ground stations with latency under 1.5 seconds and updates often in the 2–5 second range. Before 2019 only about 30% of the…
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The ESA Biomass satellite, launched on April 29, 2025, carries the first P-band synthetic aperture radar (435 MHz) to map the world’s forests in 3D and quantify their carbon content. The mission uses a 12-meter deployable antenna—the largest radar antenna ever flown—to enable detection of biomass changes as small as 10–20 tons per hectare. Biomass…
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Starlink has launched over 8,000 satellites since 2019 and serves more than 5 million users across 125+ countries as of 2025. Amazon’s Project Kuiper launched its first 27 satellites in April 2025 on an Atlas V, aiming for a 3,236-satellite constellation with Ka-band and user terminals around $400. The EU’s IRIS² plan is a €10.6…
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Sentinel-1 radar imaged the aftermath of Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019 and revealed approximately 2,165 km² of flooding around the coastal city of Beira. Idai’s satellite flood maps pinpointed about 400,000 people stranded and helped allocate rescue resources. NOAA’s GOES weather satellites monitored Hurricane Dorian in 2019 as it approached the Bahamas, providing real-time…
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Syria has conducted annual nationwide internet shutdowns on high school exam days since 2016, with 2020–2025 patterns showing daily outages of roughly 3.5 to 5.5 hours during exam periods. Syria’s shutdowns use an asymmetric model that allows outbound traffic but blocks inbound responses, making the internet effectively unusable. In Syria, the 2023 exam season produced…
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In June 2024, a team led by Japan’s NICT and Aston University achieved 402 Tbps over a single standard optical fiber using six wavelength bands (O, E, S, C, L, and U). In March 2024, the same international team reached 301 Tbps by extending into E-band and S-band with a custom amplifier for those bands.…
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