Altobridge and Gateway Communications Join Forces to Provide Cost-effective and Green-power-enabled Mobile Connectivity for Remote African Communities

Kerry Technology Park, Ireland, 1st October, 2010 – Altobridge, the leading supplier of GSM solutions for remote areas, and Gateway Communications, the leading supplier of pan-African telecommunications services, have entered into a joint sales and marketing initiative, which will offer mobile network operators (MNOs) across Africa the combined power of each company’s world-class mobile/satellite solutions and services for the delivery of cost-effective remote community mobile communications.

The agreement will see each participant effectively promoting each other’s complementary portfolio, and follows successful trials of the Altobridge lite-site™ with Gateway’s Africa CellDirect services. CellDirect is Gateway Communications’ new bandwidth-efficient, Demand Assigned Multiple Access (DAMA) VSAT solution, a major element of the company’s extensive African network and voice connectivity offerings.  The Altobridge lite-site is part of the Altobridge remote communications portfolio, which has been deployed with leading MNOs in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Altobridge CEO, Mike Fitzgerald, said, “Gateway’s satellite services offer an extremely bandwidth-efficient solution complementing our pole-mountable, low-bandwidth and low-power-consumption solution. The combination of the two will be hard to beat in terms of the total cost of ownership for any MNO deploying mobile services to remote communities and enterprises. MNOs can turn to this partnership as an effective one-stop-shop for all their remote communications requirements, knowing they will end up with the most capable and cost-effective solution-set available in the market today.”

Mike van den Bergh, Gateway Communications CEO, said, “With more connections into Africa than any other wholesale carrier we bring considerable strength to this partnership, and Altobridge’s solutions keep our customers’ costs and satellite bandwidth usage to an absolute minimum.

“It makes complete sense,” van den Bergh continued, “to combine our strengths and for Gateway Communications to recommend the Altobridge lite-site to MNOs who adopt and use our Africa CellDirect VSAT services, but who have yet to find the right technologies for their remote sites.”

Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Government agency responsible for the development and internationalisation of Irish enterprises, was instrumental in bringing the two parties together in what will be one of the strongest such partnerships for remote communications in Africa. Today’s agreement will be signed at Enterprise Ireland Headquarters in Dublin and is being hosted by CEO, Frank Ryan, and attended by Altobridge and Gateway Communications CEOs along with other key members of all three organisations.

David Byrne, Head of High Growth Markets with Enterprise Ireland, said, “Altobridge is one of Ireland’s most innovative and technologically advanced companies.  Africa is one of Ireland’s high growth markets with particular potential for Irish firms in sectors such as ICT and telecommunications.  Altobridge’s success with Gateway will endorse Ireland’s reputation as a source of innovative, quality, high-tech products and services in the African market and I congratulate them on their achievements in securing this highly significant contract with Africa’s leading telecoms company.”