SES announced today that it has signed agreements with key infrastructure service providers around the world to build its eight initial O3b mPOWER satellite ground stations. Construction has already started on these advanced technology satellite ground stations, which will become operational in the second half of this year. The eight sites will provide telemetry, tracking and control capabilities to enable SES’s management of the constellation. They will also be leveraged to raise the satellites into the right orbit after the scheduled launches. As previously announced, two of the satellite ground stations are located at Dubbo, NSW, Australia (operated by Pivotel) and Thermopylae, Greece (operated by OTE). Other locations include Merredin, Perth, Australia; Phoenix, Arizona, US; Chile; the United Arab Emirates; Senegal as well as SES’s own satellite ground station in Hawaii. Four out of the eight sites will be co-located and operated with Microsoft’s Azure data centres; the one-hop connectivity to the cloud from remote sites will provide O3b mPOWER customers the ability to optimise business operations with significant flexibility and agility.